Home, Rejoicing
by OxfordKivrin
Summary: May, 1945. Andrew Foyle comes home for good.
1. Chapter 1

When Andrew had pictured this moment of coming home for good - and he'd pictured it many times over the past five years - he'd imagined something dramatic. He'd thought he might not even be able to get his key in the lock. He'd thought he might come through the door and faint, or be sick, or sit down on the hall floor and howl like an infant. But the door opened easily, his kit bag settled naturally by the coat tree, and his hat went smoothly onto the same hook where he'd hung his school cap.

"Dad?" His voice echoed back from the quiet rooms. No trilby on the rack, no keys in the dish: Dad was out. If he hadn't been so tired Andrew would have laughed at the anticlimax of it all.

There were new curtains in the sitting room; or, more precisely, the old curtains, the ones Mum had just replaced the Christmas before she died, were back up. Andrew remembered, now that he thought of it, Dad writing something about giving away some furnishings. He wandered through to the larder (potatoes, carrots, half a loaf of brown bread, a jar of Bovril, a packet of dried eggs and two jars of quince jam - _oh, Dad, never change_ ), then back to the hall and up the stairs. On the landing a faint smell of sun-warmed wood gave him a flash of vertigo as it suddenly seemed that beyond the near door he'd find, not the spare room, but Mum's studio, and maybe Mum herself.

 _I'm old, Mum. I'm old and my eyes are buggered and I'm…_ He turned sharply and went to his own room. Tidy though it was, it felt crowded with toys, picture books, and textbooks; with the aggregate detritus of his own past. He crossed to the window, pushed back the blackout curtain, and raised the sash. A smell of cut grass and damp earth came up from the garden. On the closest branch of the oak that had been Andrew's private staircase, a few of last year's leaves hung on amid the soft new growth. He leaned out, squinting in the sunshine, and shook the branch. The bark rasped against his palms just as it always had. Not a dream, then. He was home.

He went for his kit bag and hauled it upstairs, frowning as the effort brought back the dull pain in his cheekbones and around his left eye. It would pass off, the last quack had assured him, but it would take time. Well, he had plenty of that.

The bureau drawers were full. He had to turn them out before he could unpack. How had he ever found a use for so many pullovers, or so many ties? In the bottom drawer he found his scholar's gown, the poplin creased from the careless way he'd rolled it up in 1940. Shaken out and draped over the end of the bed, it looked like a shroud. He made space for his other uniform and his demob suit in the top drawer, then crammed as many of his old clothes as would fit in around them. The rest he piled on the bed beside his gown.

At the bottom of his bag, under his flight jacket, he had three books, two notebooks, an untidy packet of letters, and a pair of photographs. The books went easily into the bookshelf, but the desk drawers were already full of paper. Andrew poked, halfheartedly, at a sheaf of first-year essays that should have gone for salvage years ago, then shut the drawer. Opened it. Shut it. "Words," he muttered aloud. "Words, words, words…" _I was good at them, once._ He put the letters in a jigsaw box on the bookshelf, but left the notebooks and the photos on the desk. Sam stared up at him from the top one, solemn in her uniform, her chin a little raised and her dark eyes watchful. _She'd_ slept in this room, back in '43 when Dad was ill. When he thought of that, it seemed to make a little more space for him there.

Somehow an hour had passed since he'd looked at his watch on the way up Steep Lane. Too long for Dad to be out getting a paper. He went back to the window and stared down through the leaves at the garden. A rise in the breeze brought the smell of earth up to him more strongly, raising memories of mud and waders. Andrew shook his head at his own slowness. Unless there was a case on, there was only one place Dad would be on a Saturday morning in May.

* * *

He felt conspicuous on the familiar road, but no one knew to question his wings, and he saw no one he recognized, though every fair-haired woman made his head turn. _Could I turn from the trees as they bend in the breeze…_ how had he ever been young enough to think that, much less say it out loud? But if that had been so long ago, how could he have already known Sam then? And if the hundreds of other times he'd walked the road to the river - sometimes brimming with pleasure to be on an outing with Dad, sometimes shuffling his feet in moody resentment - felt so close, how could those be before Sam?

It was warm in the sunlight, but cool in the dappled shade at the edges of the fields and in the hollows, cool enough for trout to be rising even in midmorning. Something familiar happened in his chest as he left the road and picked his way along the bank, but he couldn't place the sensation, or even recognize it as pleasant or painful. It welled up more strongly when his eyes found a figure in the stream, and he realized it was both at once.

Andrew couldn't see the fly now, but he could see the graceful swing of the rod as Dad cast, and imagine the fly (or lure, whichever it might be, he'd never mastered the difference) trembling on the surface as Dad played the line with his left hand. For a moment he just watched, and then said, not too loudly, "Dad."

Dad had his feet planted, but he turned not only his head but his whole upper body, and for a moment just looked at Andrew with a serious taking-in gaze. Then he blinked, and the lines around his mouth deepened with the start of a smile. The rod drooped in his suddenly slack hands.

"I thought I'd find you here," Andrew said, blinking himself. "Don't stop," he added as Dad began to reel in his line.

"Meeting this afternoon, would've stopped soon anyway." In five quick strides Dad was out of the river and up the bank. He fumbled his rod into his left hand in order to reach for Andrew with his right; Andrew accepted the handshake, but then used it to pull Dad in for a hug. It startled him all over again that his father only came up to his ear, though under the worn corduroy coat Dad's shoulders still felt as oak-solid as when Andrew used to ride on them, and Dad's hand struck firmly in the middle of Andrew's back with three or four steady pats before he drew back. "When, um. When did you…?"

"Just now. Well, a couple hours. Came down to Chailey last night and had to loaf about waiting for a lift this morning. You catching anything?"

"Nothing worth keeping." Dad led him to a nearby tree where the creel sat empty but a thermos flask showed he'd been fishing for some time. "Been to the house?" He laid his rod down and began to peel off his waders.

"Just left my bag." Andrew watched Dad crouch to tidy his lures and tie down his line, then stand to shake the water from his waders. The thick, curly hair at the back of his neck was grayer now, his hands were more weathered, and the skin hung a little looser at his jaw, but he moved as smoothly as ever. "The street was looking very festive."

Dad made a wry face. "Half the population seems to be trying to whip up more excitement; other half seems terrified everyone's going to riot. You come through London?" He went on, after Andrew's nod, "How is it up there?"

They walked home slowly, talking of London and transport. Andrew carried the creel. Standing on the front steps holding it while Dad unlocked the front door felt so timelessly familiar that it gave him another instant of disorientation. "No, haven't had lunch," he said, dragging his mind to the present. "Is anything open Saturdays? I've seen the larder."

"The larder's fine, Andrew, you're very difficult to please." Dad dropped his keys into the dish with exaggerated disgust, and they grinned at each other. The moment stretched, and something shifted around Dad's eyes, making his gaze both sad and piercing. _I'd have laughed, before,_ Andrew realized. He thought about trying, but it was much too late. Dad went on, "There's any number of places, must be half a dozen opened or re-opened this past month alone." He shrugged off his coat and hung up his hat. "Can give you a drink, at least, if you'd…?"

"Please."

Dad smiled and tilted his head towards the sitting room. "Your chair's where you left it."

Andrew didn't sit, but stood in the middle of the sitting room, carefully not fidgeting while Dad poured. Mum's picture was on the desk and his own, the serious formal portrait from when he got his wings, stood on the table by Dad's chair. Andrew thought he probably ought to feel something about that beyond distaste at his own pompous expression in the photograph, but he couldn't muster up the energy for it.

"Here."

"Cheers, Dad." Andrew raised the glass, and then raised his eyebrows when he saw the drinks tray on the table. "A full bottle of scotch! Where on earth did you get that?"

"It's bourbon."

"Oh. Your American pal?" Andrew could picture the bluff, cheerful face, but it took him a moment to find the name. "Captain Kieffer?"

Dad gave a sideways nod with a little twist of his mouth. "Major, now."

"How is he?" Andrew sat down and tasted the bourbon. Rough, but not smoky at all. It burned comfortingly going down.

"Eager to get back to his family." Dad brought his own drink through to the sitting room. "So, is this just a visit, or are you back for good?"

"I'm not flying anymore." He wanted to leave it at that, but he'd need to explain sometime. "I had a touch of sinusitis a couple of months ago."

Dad stood still, looking at him.

"Well, more than a touch," Andrew admitted. "Four days in hospital."

The pattern of Dad's tie shimmered as he drew a quick breath, but all he said was, "Cured?"

 _Depends on what you mean._ He managed, just, not to rub at his left eye. "Don't ask. It was bloody painful. Then the Group Captain sent me home." He took another drink, bracing himself for questions, but Dad seemed to take the 'don't ask' to heart.

"So you're out of it?" he said, at length.

Andrew nodded. "Yes. I made it."

Dad looked down with a small, close-mouthed smile that made his face suddenly soft.

"I keep thinking…" Andrew stopped, but it was too late. Dad was watching him again. "About all the ones that didn't. Rex Talbot. Charlie Page." _And the ones I've forgotten. And the ones whose names I never knew._ "So many of them. They were my friends, and yet it's like…" _They never lived._ "I hardly knew them. Here one day, gone the next. The best of the best."

Dad took a drink, then studied the inside of his glass. He drew a breath like an audible quotation mark. "Why them, not you?" He fixed his shrewd gaze on Andrew.

It was an uncomfortable relief to be laid so bare. Andrew let out a sigh. "That's what I wonder all the time." He felt his face pull into a mirthless smile. "They say the real fliers, the ones who knew what they were doing, they were the easiest to bring down. It was the lazy bastards, the ones who cut corners, who didn't do it by the book - we got away with it because Jerry didn't know what to expect."

"Mm." Dad tilted his head at the angle that meant acknowledgement but not agreement. "Who're 'they?'" he asked after a moment.

"People." Andrew sniffed his bourbon and took another sip, then changed the subject. "How's Sam?"

Dad widened his eyes. "Didn't think you'd need to ask _me_ that."

"I know what she writes." Andrew ran a thumb along the base of his tumbler. "I don't know… how much she worries about worrying me." He watched Dad consider the question with the familiar twitch of his mouth, and the same vertigo that had grabbed him on the stairs caught him again. _I had the strangest dream, Dad, I dreamed I was grown up and there was a war and Mum was dead._ But they were drinking bourbon, and the curtains were wrong, so it was all real.

"She's been well," Dad said. "Doing some voluntary work at SSAFA." He pulled his mouth down at the corners. "Nagging me to reconsider leaving."

"But you're not. Reconsidering, I mean."

He shook his head. "Can't wait."

"Is she going home to Lyminster? Once you don't need her?"

He raised his eyebrows and gave Andrew a sideways look. "Nnnot… exactly my place to say, is it?"

" _Dad,"_ Andrew protested. Under the steady blue gaze he put his glass down. "All right, that's fair," he said. "But I won't apologize for asking. I'm just… trying to get my bearings."

"She know you were ill?" There was the slightest emphasis on _she._

"Is that your place to ask?" He looked at the carpet, but what he saw was Sam's neat, round writing on Dad's notepaper. _...your father's been taken ill…_ An echo of the shudder that had gone through him that noontime in the mess at Debden ran again down his back and his left leg. He pushed his foot into the floor to still it. "I told her I felt rotten and was going to sick call. Told her I was grounded for a bit." He hooked his fingers together in his lap. "Haven't written since. Almost a month." The clock ticked. In the street a car sputtered past. "Stupid bloody war," he added, almost involuntarily, under his breath. "Dad…" His voice sounded pleading and childish; he swallowed and tried to bring it down to something ordinary. "Do you think it was worth it?"

Silence. "Well." Now Dad was looking at the carpet. He tilted his head. "We've all paid a price, some more than others, but I have... absolutely no doubt whatsoever."

 _Of course that's the right answer. Of course._ Andrew picked up his drink again, but a dull raw feeling under his sternum kept him from taking a swallow. "Yes," he said quietly.

Dad raised his eyes. "And I'm very glad you're back." He lifted his glass slightly, and the corners of his mouth tightened again.

Andrew nodded, and tried to smile.

"Look," Dad straightened up in his chair. "I'm sorry I've got to go to this committee meeting. Should be done by five; why don't you come down, meet me at the museum, and we'll have a walk, find some supper out? Can't promise anything about menus, but it'll have to be better than the larder."

Andrew nodded with what he hoped looked like enthusiasm. "Yes, sounds good. Sorry, I'm a bit… head in the clouds." _Or… not._ "Sam coming for you?"

"Not on the weekend. I'll walk. Should change, though…" He stood, glass still in hand. "Cafe on Broad Street's not bad these days. Lunch for you," he added. "D'you need…?"

"No. No, fine for cash, but I'll have bread and jam or something, if we're going out later."

"There's only…"

"Quince. I saw. Well, I'll know I'm home." Quince was Dad's favorite; Andrew used to complain that there was always more of it in the larder than anything else and Dad used to retort that it was because Andrew put away half jars of raspberry or strawberry at a sitting. It was hard, now, to imagine being that hungry.

Dad nodded. He paused beside Andrew's chair and put a hand on the corner of the back. "Very glad," he said again, roughly, and turned away.

Andrew stared down at the trembling surface of his drink until he heard Dad's step on the stairs, then took a gulp to feel the burn again, to feel something that made sense.

* * *

 _The Messerschmitt dropped away in one of those impossibly steep dives that a Spitfire couldn't reliably follow without stalling, and Andrew stomped on his rudder to turn as he pulled up, scanning the sky for other planes. The steady blast of his oxygen line made his throat dry and his chin cold even as his scarf stuck to his sweaty throat. "Yellow Three, this is Yellow Leader, any bandits, over?"_

 _Before Tom could answer a blot appeared in Andrew's mirror and he tightened his stomach muscles against the lightheadedness as he turned faster and the blot spread, growing wings before it slid out of the mirror and appeared even larger in the corner of his eye. He flexed his thumb over his firing button._

 _His R/T fizzed in his ears, and the same fizz seemed to fill up his vision, though his oxygen was still blasting and he was curving out of the sharp turn into a shallower one. He swiped at his goggles, then at the coop over his head, but his arm moved like a sack of sand and he couldn't see any clearer. He blinked; no help. Fog on his goggles, or on the canopy, or in his eyes, or outside; he couldn't tell. With faraway fingers he made sure the oxygen was on full, sucked down a deep breath, squinched his eyes shut and forced them open._

Andrew snapped his head around, looking for the blot, or vapor trails, or the fast-growing flyspecks of other aircraft. But he saw only wallpaper. Pale green wallpaper with darker medallions. His wallpaper; his bedroom. The pressure on his chest was his twisted braces, not his life vest and Sutton harness. He dropped back on the pillow, breathing hard, willing his heart to slow down, and grimacing at the way his shirt stuck to his skin.

"Andrew," Dad said, very mildly, from the foot of the bed.

 _Oh hell. Oh_ bloody _hell._ Through the window the oak tree was gilded with evening sunlight, and Dad was watching him with an all-too-familiar look of restrained worry. "Sorry." Andrew ran a hand over his face and let out a long breath. "Fell asleep," he added, unnecessarily, as he swung his legs to the floor and into the tangle of old clothes he'd pushed off the bed when when he lay down intending just to rest his eyes. _How long was he watching me? Did I shout?_ "Sorry, Dad. I meant to come meet you."

"Doesn't matter." Dad pulled his mouth to one side, considering.

 _Don't ask,_ Andrew thought fervently. _Don't ask._ "You wait for me long?"

"Not at all. Hungry now? Can bring you something."

"I'm not ill," Andrew snapped, rubbing the aching spot between his left eye and his nose.

"No, no, no. Course not. But if you're tired…"

"No. No, I'll come down, just... give me a minute to wash and… change my shirt." He hauled himself up from the bed, sidled past Dad to the dresser, and escaped to the bathroom. In the mirror his own face looked puffy and pale aside from the red marks the folds of the counterpane had left on his cheek. He needed a shave, but he settled for splashing cold water over his face and scrubbing under his arms. The sweat of fear always stank worse than any other kind. He'd forgotten to get a towel from the airing cupboard, so he used the drier bits of his soiled shirt before buttoning himself into the clean one.

When he came back, Dad was still in his bedroom, standing at the desk, the much-traveled photographs from Andrew's kit bag in his hands. "Where'd you get this?"

"Which?"

Dad put down the leatherette case with the formal picture of him and mum, and held up the other.

"Oh. Sam gave it to me. When we were in Lyminster. I wanted a snap of her."

"Her parents didn't have anything less…" Dad tilted his head. " I mean, this was just Studdock larking about with the Kodak when he should have been photographing tire marks. She's not even smiling."

"I know. But I like it. Her parents have loads but half of them are formal family portraits and the rest… just show a pretty country vicar's daughter. Not..." _Not my Sam._ "Not how tough she is." He put out his hand and Dad passed the picture over. "Kept it in my pocket," Andrew admitted, running a finger along the crease that went through Sam's hat and Dad's shoulder. "When I flew." In the silence after that it occurred to him to wonder that Dad, usually so scrupulous about waiting for an invitation, hadn't stayed in the doorway, by the head of the bed, but come all the way into the room. As if he knew a voice from behind would be worse.

"But you, um." Dad rolled his lower lip under his teeth. "Haven't written her? Since you were grounded?"

"I kept… waiting to have something solid to say. They kept bumping me along to different quacks before deciding I was done." In the notebooks just inches from Dad's hand he'd started half a dozen letters and abandoned them all. "Seemed easier just to come home." With every day that passed the fact of not-writing had grown bigger, rapidly overwhelming the weight of anything he had failed to write. The longer he left it, the more important it became to write a proper letter, which seemed harder and harder to do when he seemed to be always packing and unpacking, or dressing and undressing, and carrying chits around sprawling hospitals in search of a Captain Such-and-such in Radio-something or Matron This in Ocular That.

He rubbed the photo again. Out of the past two years they'd had less than a fortnight together, all told, when you added up the days in Hastings while Dad was ill, her visit to Debden and his to Lyminster, and one day in London. In that time they'd managed more real conversations than they'd had in the six months they'd been walking out in Hastings before he… _before._ And they'd written, and phoned when they could. And it was more time than most men in the services were lucky enough to have with their girls, or even wives. But it was hard not to worry that it was very little reality to hold against an idea of someone.

"Well," said Dad. "As you said before, not my business. I'm sorry."

"What?" Andrew looked up. "No. I mean… that's all right. It's good of you, too," he added, motioning with the photo.

"Is it?"

"It's as if you're thinking, 'Andrew, what mess have you got into this time.' And already thinking how to help me get out."

Dad dropped his chin and his eyes. His mouth drew in small, then curved into a smile. "Potato and carrot soup all right?" he said, after a moment.

"Yeah."

"Right. You lay the table." He jerked his chin towards the stairs

Dad put the gramophone on rather than the wireless - something French and faintly familiar. They talked of general things: the committee on victory celebrations, the neighbors, and the announcement that the FA Cup would resume in the coming season. Andrew dropped a plate while they were doing the washing up, but he did manage to slow its fall with his knee so it only chipped a bit. Still, he wished Dad would scold him for carelessness rather than saying, too quietly, "that's all right."

They played chess afterwards, though, and Dad didn't pull any punches there. "You've learned some new tricks," Andrew said, as he set up the pieces after the first brief game.

"Met a very good player. Last year. Took me on as a… sort of student."

"Maybe he'd teach me." Andrew meant it as a mere pleasantry, but Dad's face went still in a way that made it clear he'd said something wrong. "Probably I'm not up to his standard."

"Not that. He's unavailable." Dad turned towards the windows, half rising from his chair, then sat down. "Keep thinking we're going to be nicked for breaking the blackout." He leaned forward over the board and motioned for Andrew to make the first move.

"Is this what you'll do when you've left the police?" Andrew asked, as they played.

"Hope I'll attend fewer committee meetings."

"Right. But… fish, play chess…?" _Read by the fire, go to bed, do it all again?_ Suddenly restless, Andrew got up and went to the sideboard. "D'you want any?" he asked, pouring himself a small measure of bourbon.

"No, thank you." Dad shrugged. "Finish my book, do something with the garden. Like to travel a bit, when that's possible again."

He bent over to make a move, then leaned against the mantle. "Won't you need to keep Sam around, to help with the book?"

"Nnnot necessarily, if I'm already housing and feeding someone with more than half of a university education."

"If I remember any of it." Andrew made a face and then took the tiniest sip of his drink.

"Think you'll go back?"

"To Oxford?" He'd assumed he would, when he left for the RAF, but the longer he flew ops the less he'd thought of the future at all. When he'd started again it had been in tentative, specific ways - _after the war I'd like another bike_ or _I'll take Sam out for all the ice cream she can eat._ "Perhaps. Suppose I ought to finish. There's a letter somewhere saying I can have another year on my scholarship."

"Check."

"What? Damn." Andrew moved a knight to block Dad's bishop. "Not giving you much of a game, sorry."

Dad shook his head, studying the board.

Andrew took another sip.

"Does it," Dad said, and stopped.

"What?"

"Does it. Um. Help if someone wakes you. When you dream."

Andrew looked at the wall. "I'm all right, Dad, don't worry about it."

"Not exactly what I asked."

"Don't know," he admitted, after considering and discarding a few more evasive answers. It was just business as usual, in officers' quarters, for there to be a bit of noise. Back at the beginning, he'd gone into Douglas' room to wake him, once. It must have been in that narrow stretch between Rex going down and Douglas dying himself, because Andrew had been sitting up smoking when he'd heard the restless muttering next door.

"All right if I try?" Dad was still looking at the board.

All at once Andrew remembered being six or so and waking in the midst of a tremendous storm with thunder like avalanches of breaking glass. He'd been frozen to his bed, too frightened even to cry out, but Dad came to check the window, and then wordlessly lay down beside him. Usually when Andrew needed anything in the night it was Mum that came; sometimes Dad wasn't even home. After all, policemen were needed at all hours. But that night it had been Dad, warm and solid, a bulwark against the noise and the light. "Yeah, all right," he answered.

Dad nodded, and moved his queen. "Check," he said.

* * *

After all that, Andrew slept too fitfully to dream at all. About one o'clock he gave up entirely, put on his light, and curled against the headboard reading Sherlock Holmes. At four he finally felt drowsy enough to try again. He dozed steadily, if not deeply, until the sun began to creep across his wall and he heard Dad, first splashing at the sink in the bathroom, then moving down the stairs. Andrew turned over and made a half-hearted attempt to get back to sleep, but soon abandoned it and went to take his own turn in the bathroom. He shaved carefully, then dressed in his less-worn uniform trousers and last clean shirt and brushed his tunic before laying it out ready on the bed. His ribbons looked tawdry in the sunlight. Andrew adjusted his braces and decided the jacket could wait.

When he came downstairs he found a rack of toast and a pot of tea already out on the dining table, and Dad in shirtsleeves at the cooker making porridge. Andrew took the teapot back into the kitchen. "'Morning," he said, opening the cabinet for a mug.

"There are _teacups_ , Andrew," Dad said, putting the lid on the pot.

He set the teapot down, but got out two cups and saucers. "Can't we eat in here?" _And try to be ordinary?_

"If you like. Sleep all right?"

"Slept too long in the afternoon, I think. But not bad." He went back for the toast. In the kitchen they moved easily around each other, setting out the plates and the milk and the jam, even though Andrew felt as if he were watching himself from a long way off. "Heard from Uncle Charles lately?" he asked as he sat down.

"Mm, been a few weeks. Admiralty has him managing ship movements for the Far East so all… this," Dad waved towards the street, "isn't going to smooth things much for him. Hope he and Nora might come down for a day or two, though. They'll want to see you."

"Mm." Oh God, he hadn't even _thought_ about Aunt Nora. "I should write them."

"That would be kind Though Charles always says he's not much of a hand at writing to you." Dad poured the tea.

"No. That was always a sort of a relief, really. " Andrew picked up his cup, and matched the wry smile his father gave him.

And then the phone rang, and everything went to hell.

Andrew sat rigid, breathing carefully. _It's just a phone. It doesn't mean anything. It won't be anything you have to do; it wouldn't be anything you COULD do, even if it were a scramble. You don't have to fly, you idiot. You can't fly. You can't bloody see to fly._

Dad got up with a little wordless grumble and took another swallow of tea before moving - slowly, slowly - towards the sitting room. Andrew set his tea down as if it were high explosive. He eyed the back door, but both the deadbolts were shot. It would take much too long to get it open. But he wouldn't need to get it open, or get upstairs. He was fine.

Another ring, shrill as a siren. Sweat leapt out across Andrew's back and an ominous tingling started in his cheeks. Dad paused by the cooker to wipe his hands on the dishtowel, then peek at the porridge. Andrew swallowed, and instantly regretted it. _Damn. Damn. Damndamndamn…_

It was four steps to the sink. He just made it.

"Andrew!"

"...Sorry…" He hung on to the taps as he heaved. The telephone screamed. "Get the…"

"They'll ring back. Shh." Dad put one hand on his back, then the other on his forehead. "Shh." His palm was rough and cool, exactly as it always had been.

A new sound forced its way out between the bursts of retching. Andrew couldn't tell himself whether it was a cough or a sob.

"Shh, all right... " Dad turned on the cold tap, shook his fingers under the stream, then smoothed Andrew's hair back again. "Shhhhh."

Andrew braced his elbows on the cold enamel, panting against the slowly-receding waves of nausea. After a few long moments, he cupped a hand under the tap, but his whole arm shook so badly that the water scattered before he could take a drink. "No…" he protested, when Dad put out his own hand.

"Rinse your mouth," he said firmly, holding his hand to Andrew's lips. "Spit. Again. Good. Sit down?"

Andrew shook his head. "Think I'm all right but… a minute?"

Dad nodded. He rinsed away the mess, switched off the tap, then dried his hands and tossed the towel in the small hamper beside the sink. "Don't think you have a temperature… did the sinusitis…?"

"No."

"Does your head ache? Your mother used to sometimes have…"

"It's… it's the phone." Andrew looked at the floor. His throat burned. "It's the damned bloody _telephone_ , Dad. It's not even that it sounds to me like a siren, or a plane coming down. I know it's a phone." He took a shaky breath. "Ringing. Like in the dispersal hut."

For a moment it was quiet. "Ah," said Dad, very softly.

He couldn't stop talking. "That… first summer. Some of the chaps would have to go out and be sick, when the phone rang. Charlie did, sometimes. Tried to be casual about it. Laugh at himself when it turned out to be nothing more than 'tea's on the way' or 'stand down to fifteen-minute readiness.' Rex and I tried to be sympathetic. But we… no, I… I was so smug I didn't feel it like that. Even when I lost my nerve completely I didn't… well." He turned away and rubbed the back of one hand over his clammy forehead. "God, I'm such a bloody fool."

"Not how I see it."

Pain flared around his eye. "Don't be _kind_ to me."

"Wasn't trying to be." Dad moved past him to the larder and came back with a canister of Borwick's. Unhurriedly, he mixed a spoonful into a glass of water and held it out to Andrew. "Gargle, if you don't think you can swallow it. Throat must feel like hell."

Andrew had to take the glass in both hands, but he took it, and cautiously wet his lips again. When that didn't stir up a fresh revolt, he took a small mouthful, tipped his head back, gargled, and spat. It did help. "Sorry," he repeated.

"You shouldn't have to apologize."

Something in Dad's voice made Andrew look at him. He was looking out the window over the sink with a gaze that went further than next-door's garden, one corner of his mouth pulled in so tightly that his lips were white.

"Dad?"

He came to life again. "The time you were sick all over the shopping, including the new Japanese paper I'd got for your mum's birthday, _that_ you can apologize for."

Andrew's eyes stung - that had been a family joke for years afterwards, particularly as he, at four, had been so pleased with himself for being sick in the bag rather than on the carpet. Then the phone rang again, and Dad made a sharp movement towards him. "No," he said, through cold lips, "It's not every time, but…?"

Dad nodded, touched his arm, and vanished into the dining room. He must have sprinted, because the phone didn't ring again. Andrew sat down at the table and took tiny sips of the bicarb and water. In a minute Dad was back, his face tight.

"They want me at work," he said.

"I'm all right." Then, as his mind slowly re-engaged, Andrew added, "It's Sunday!"

"Not how I'd choose to spend it, but there's been a murder - potential, anyway. I may be able to leave it to Milner…"

"His wife's expecting, didn't you say?"

Dad nodded, slowly. "Any day now."

Andrew shook his head. "I'm all right," he repeated. "Really. It just… happens, and then it's done. I'll be ready for porridge in half an hour." He dropped his gaze away from the look on Dad's face.

"I'm sorry," Dad said.

" _I'm_ sorry. Whole country's preparing for a giant knees-up and you're stuck with the body in the library."

From his expression, Dad seemed torn between pleasure that Andrew'd made a joke and irritation that he was making light of murder. "It's the museum," he said, taking a slice of toast. "Don't let the porridge burn."

"I won't." Andrew didn't quite like to ask, but he needed to know. "Sam going to pick you up?"

"Brooke rang but she was out already. Constable's coming." A pause. "Could be either church or SSAFA," he added.

Andrew nodded.

" _Will_ you ring me at the station? If…"

His eye throbbed, maybe in belated reaction to the effort of being sick or maybe just in impotent response to the pointless, inadmissible anger that rushed over him. "Yeah," he said roughly. "Go dress."

Dad frowned, but he went.

There was still a tin of scouring powder on the bottom shelf in the larder, and a well-worn sponge. Andrew scrubbed out the sink, giving special attention to the seam around the drain, then washed his hands and checked the porridge. It was thick and a little scorched, but not burned. He shut off the flame and put a few spoonfuls in a bowl. After he waved farewell to Dad he even managed to eat them, and drink another cup of tea, before putting away what was left and washing up the dishes. Then, carefully not giving himself time to dither, he put on his tie and jacket, and got his key. When he put on his cap, the figure in the mirror looked as if it belonged in a museum case, next to a typed card reading FIGHTER PILOT, 1940-45.

He was tempted to rip off his jacket, run back upstairs, pull the curtains, and fall on his bed, either to sleep or to bury himself in the pages of a book. But if he once started that, he might never stop.

 _Better out than in,_ he thought, and squared his shoulders.


	2. Chapter 2

Andrew loitered outside the SSAFA center for what felt like a very long time. When people came or went he twice pretended to be setting his watch, and once to be tying his shoe. Finally shame outweighed his nervousness, and he tucked his hat under his arm and climbed the steps.

Inside he found a single cavernous wood-paneled room holding long clothes racks, large tea urns, a table of pamphlets, and smaller tables where men in uniform talked earnestly or bitterly with bland-faced professionally-friendly women. Andrew scanned them, his stomach trembling like a blancmange. Something in his chest seemed to swell and tighten at once when his eyes found the figure he was seeking. Foolishly, obviously, the words jumped into his mind: _There's Sam!_

She had her hair pulled back at the nape of her neck. The honey-colored curls looked even brighter in the dim room and against her pale green cardigan. She brought a stack of pamphlets to the table and began sorting them into piles with dutiful attention, though he could see suppressed boredom in the determined set of her shoulders. He'd seen the same tension when she arranged flowers in Lyminster. She seemed thinner than when he'd last seen her (more than nine months ago, for those fifteen harried hours in London that they'd spent mostly clinging to each other in crowded railway stations) but she looked beautiful. _What do I say? "I'm back?" "Sorry?"_ He didn't have to decide; she looked up.

For an instant it seemed she didn't recognize him. Then her lips parted, and her hands tightened on the pamphlets, bending them nearly in half as her arms curled in against her chest. All at once she thrust the papers onto the table, sending two other stacks spilling to the ground as she closed the distance between them. One hand gripped his collar and the other curled around his ear, pulling his head down even as she pushed him along the aisle between two racks of clothes until his back met the wall and her mouth met his.

Andrew's breath sobbed in his throat as he kissed her back. She smelled exactly the same - soap flakes and leather and linen - and her heart beat fast as a bird's under his arms when he hugged her as close as he could which was not nearly close enough. Her chin collided roughly with his ( _good thing I shaved)_ but she only made a tiny sound in her throat and kissed him harder. He lifted her off the ground and she clung to his shoulders in response.

Finally, too soon, she drew back just far enough to look at him. "Hello," Sam said.

Andrew laughed. He didn't even have to think about it; it happened. "Hello," he answered.

"All right?" she asked, very quietly, rubbing his shoulder with one hand.

He nodded. "All right."

She lifted her other hand and laid her fingers against his right temple. "All right?" she repeated, even more softly.

His breath caught as he struggled to answer.

"Miss Stewart?"

"Oh, _drat."_

Andrew nearly laughed again. Sam could put more venom into one "drat" than some pilots put in a whole string of curses. "Sorry," he said, out loud. "My fault."

"No it _isn't._ " Sam turned around, though she interlaced her fingers with his and stayed glued to his side. "I'm sorry, Miss Holland, this is…"

"Obviously," said Miss Holland, an older woman with an air of authority. Upon inspection, she looked as if she were trying to assume a sternness she didn't feel. "I was going to say, if you could tidy up the leaflets I think that'll be all for this morning."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes." She moved on towards another woman coming in with a box full of clothes.

Sam smiled up at him. "I won't be a minute."

"Let me help." He squeezed her hand before letting it go.

It felt oddly satisfying to sort leaflets, even when the titles about job schemes and education struck unnervingly close to home. He couldn't quite remember when he'd last done something that seemed so unequivocally useful. And it gave him an almost shocking degree of pleasure just to watch Sam's pretty freckled hands squaring up stacks of paper, and to feel the echo of her touch on his face.

When they'd finished the leaflets, Andrew stood about uneasily, deflecting the briskly sympathetic attention of a couple other volunteers, while Sam spoke to Miss Holland and collected her handbag. He felt awkward again when they got out into the street, but Sam took his hand and started them walking towards the shore. "I'm _so_ glad to see you," she said, her eyes shining.

He gripped her hand hard. "I'm glad to see you. How are you?" he asked, before she could ask any questions.

"I'm very well. Except that no one will give me a job." She looked suddenly woebegone. "I can get interviews, but then it all seems to go wrong. Though it might be just as well, really, the last couple likely wouldn't have suited me at all, but I don't know that I'd be strong enough to say no if anyone offered me a position. I nearly begged Milner to take me with him to Brighton, but he says they won't give him a car."

"Brighton!" Andrew paused in midstep.

"I know, but it'd be better than Lyminster." She sighed. "It took a war to get me out of Lyminster; if I go back to stay it'll close over me like, like quicksand."

He could picture it all too well, despite the briefness of his one visit. The sleepy village green; the isolated vicarage; her mother's dreamy abstraction and her father's nervous energy. The tree in the back garden that she'd climb to get away. _It was like I couldn't breathe, sometimes,_ she'd said, the day he'd climbed it with her.

The memory usually gave him a shiver of pleasure, an echo of how he'd trembled when she traced the curve of his ear with her fingers, how she shook when he laid a kiss on her throat, how they both had gone shy and stiff with excitement when they spoke, hesitantly, about the future. The shiver didn't come now.

 _Don't think about yourself_. _Think about her job. Her finding a job. In Hastings._ "I know you'd applied to an architect's office. Was that one of...?"

"No, that position was filled by the time I turned up for the interview. One of these was an advertising agency; the advert was for a secretary but in fact they wanted someone who could make up slogans, so that was no good. And the other was a businessman who's planning to go into politics and wanted an assistant. Well, that's what he _said_ he wanted." Sam frowned ferociously. "It would be ever so much easier if people would be straightforward in their adverts."

"What _did_ he want?" Andrew's free hand curled into a fist.

"Well, it certainly looked as if his last assistant had been his mistress as well. Which I suppose he couldn't exactly put in the advert, but it would have saved me a taxi fare and him a good deal of time if he had. He didn't try anything," Sam assured him. "But it wasn't pleasant."

"Can I black his eyes for you?" He tried to speak lightly. It was always tricky, once they were back face to face, to find the right pitch, to sympathize without seeming to want to wrap her up in cotton wool.

"No. He's not worth it. And I'm all right. Really, I am." She stopped walking to wrap her other hand over his, and he realized that his arm was shaking.

"Good." Andrew managed a smile, and let her draw him to the side of the pavement.

Sam smiled back, but hesitantly, and kept holding his hand in both of hers. "How are you?"

 _I'd be better if I knew how to answer that._ "...disoriented?" he said, after a moment, and then, "Demobbed."

"Really? Entirely out? They're not going to send you to invade Japan or something?"

"No. I…" He couldn't look at her while he said it. "That awful headache I was moaning to you about, it turned out to be sinusitis, and it… seems to have mucked up my eyes. Can't fly anymore. Can't…" he shrugged, then tapped the corner of his left eye with his free hand. "Can't focus fast enough between near and far." He dragged his gaze back up to Sam's face.

She looked stunned, and concerned, but not pitying. "Oh." She reached up to stroke the spot he'd touched.

"I'm sorry I haven't written. Sorry if you worried."

Sam shook her head, then shrugged. "I worry when you write, too, the worrying is just what happens. I knew you'd write if you could before going back on ops."

He wanted to bark _don't be kind to me!_ the way he had at Dad in the kitchen, but this was Sam and it wouldn't be fair. "Still. I'm sorry."

"You're _home._ For good. In _one piece."_

"More or less."

She cupped her hand around the back of his head and rose up on her toes to kiss him again, briefly but fiercely.

"Does it even feel real to you?" she asked, settling back on her heels.

"No," he admitted.

"No," she agreed. "How could it?" She let her hand rest in the center of his chest for a moment, then tugged him into motion again. "Even just coming back from Malta, that would feel odd enough, never mind everything else."

His eyes stung with sheer relief, as if he'd been about to fall and had caught himself, or someone had caught him. He squeezed her hand again.

"Now, where shall we go?" Sam asked, as they reached the end of the street. "Do you need to be back for lunch?"

"No, Dad's…" Oh, he was an idiot not to have thought this through. "Dad's at work," he finished.

"The victory committee again? On Sunday _morning?"_ Sam sounded scandalized.

"No… he was called out first thing. Body at the museum, apparently. Come on, I'll walk you home to change. They're going to _need_ you," Andrew went on, when she hesitated, excitement and worry warring on her face.

"You don't mind?"

 _That you've still got a job to do and I'm… whatever I am? That you're looking at me like I'm a child who can't be left alone?_ "Of course not."

"Sure? There are _quite_ a few constables now…"

"D'you think I want my Dad getting driven by some green constable? Of course I'd rather we all sit around eating strawberries and cream but he's got to work so you've got to work so there it is. Sorry," he added, trying to gentle his voice.

Sam nodded.

"One last hurrah, right?" He managed to smile. "You can see me anytime, now. Murders, those are special."

She smiled a little bit at that, though her eyes were still worried.

"Sorry," he said again. "I'm…"

"No." She took a deep breath. "I'm being…"

He shook his head, stepped back, and gave her a little bow. "May I see you home, Miss Stewart?" he asked. As he'd hoped, the teasing formality made her smile properly.

"If you would be so kind, Mr. Foyle," she said.

As she took his arm, he swallowed against a burst of gratitude that somehow she'd known what he hadn't realized until that moment: that even in jest it would be a comfort to be _mister_ and not _Squadron Leader._ He felt as if, though he might still be sealed in a glass case, there was a crack in the glass, and a whisper of a breeze coming through it.

* * *

It gave Andrew an almost physical pang of loneliness and envy to watch Sam set off on her bicycle for the station, but he exerted himself to smile when she glanced back, and give a cheerful wave. Then, mindful of her landlady's gimlet eye upon him from the window of her front room, he turned and walked purposefully in the opposite direction. He wandered along the edge of Alexandra Park, but didn't go in, unwilling to test his equilibrium with the memories of outings to the duck pond, or games of cricket and football and tennis. _Can I even play tennis now?_ The quacks all said he wouldn't notice any change in daily life, but he didn't know how much to trust that. He passed the war memorial with his eyes averted and his thoughts carefully fixed on the anticipatory quiet of the bunting-bedecked houses.

The war had left its mark in the streets of the Old Town. Railings had vanished except in the spots (like Dad's house) where they were most necessary; here and there bombs had left gaps like missing teeth between buildings; and everything wanted new paint. The very shabbiness felt comforting after the postcard-bright Mediterranean blues and whites and greens of Malta.

He didn't want to go back in the empty house just yet, so he rambled a little further, around the corner and past the rubble that had been Carlo's restaurant. _What ever happened to Tony?_ he wondered. They'd been friendly as boys, and then very close in the first couple years after Mum died, but by the time Andrew went up to Oxford they'd drifted apart. And then Andrew had joined up, and Tony (Dad had told him) enlisted not long after. _Probably wasn't at Dunkirk… but there's no shortage of ways to go._ Two wasn't a very large family, but still there was something unnatural in the thought of an entire family gone. _Why them, and not Dad and me?_

Andrew turned away and walked more briskly, as if he could leave the thoughts behind if he just moved fast enough. _Doing_ something would help more; it was pitiful how reassuring it had been just to sort pamphlets, to have a small, achievable task with visible results. But sorting his own old papers, alone, in his room, would be a recipe for moping. Maybe he could get his bike out of the shed and tinker with that, though there wasn't any petrol for it.

When he wrestled the back door open, after eating lunch and changing into old clothes that fit all wrong, too loose in the waist and too tight at the shoulder, he found that the he was not the only one in the street looking for activity. The Fullers, two doors down, were busy disinterring their Anderson from their back garden. A little uncertainly he went to offer his labor, and spent a few blessedly mindless hours digging, and hauling, and coaxing the nuts off screws.

Mr. Fuller was nowhere in evidence, and Andrew didn't like to ask about him, but Mrs. Fuller seemed cheerful as ever. Rob had grown from the twelve-year-old Andrew remembered into a tall, wiry young man of seventeen. And Amanda, who was close to Andrew's age, had two children now: a shy, stocky boy of four or so, and a fearless younger girl who kept trying to steal the tools. She settled somewhat when Andrew asked her to carry the spanner between him and Rob, though she managed to get earth and grease all over her frock. "Take down bombs," she said, over and over, with an air of satisfaction. "Take down bombs."

He put off Mrs. Fuller's invitation to stay for tea, but accepted the offer of a few sausages to take home, smiling dutifully at the familiar jokes about how little meat was to be found in them these days before saying his goodbyes and making his way home. It was good to be tired from physical effort, but he still felt restless, especially in the shut-up stillness of the house. He put the wireless on, just for the noise, and had a bitter little laugh at his own inconsistency when the sound of the static soothed rather than unsettled him. He washed off the garden dirt, changed back into his blues, and put himself to work making supper.

Dad came in a little before six, with heavy steps but a restrained urgency in his voice when he called out out a greeting.

"Back here," Andrew answered from the kitchen. He switched off the oven and pulled out the plate of sausages which had been keeping hot there. He brought them through to the dining room where he found Dad, hand frozen in the act of loosening his tie, staring at the laid table and the casserole dish of mashed potatoes. "Hungry?" Andrew asked.

"Mostly wondering what you've done with my _son."_ Dad's face relaxed into a slight teasing smile.

Andrew rolled his eyes. "It's just bangers and mash, Dad. Even you'll admit I can't make too much of a mess of that."

Dad looked down. "Thank you," he said. "Where'd you get the sausages?

"Mrs. Fuller. They were digging up their Anderson; I went over to help." Andrew shrugged self-consciously as he felt his father's eyes on him. "Had to find something to do." _Not to mope._ "So who's been murdered?" he went on, as they sat down.

"Man called Ziegler - a doctor."

"German?" Andrew served himself some potatoes, then nudged the dish towards Dad.

"Austrian, but as English as you and me. On this committee; was stabbed yesterday, must have been just leaving after the meeting."

"That make you a suspect?"

"That's the one problem I haven't got," Dad said dryly. "Two witnesses that I left before he did." He cut into a sausage. "You saw Sam."

Andrew wondered if the odd feeling of warmth in his cheeks was a blush. "She told you?"

Dad tilted his head. "Only in that she came into the office looking like a walking blackout violation."

"Went to find her at the SSAFA center." Definitely a blush.

"Mm." Dad chewed. "Rubs off on you very quickly."

Andrew took up his knife and fork. "It's just bangers and mash," he repeated, trying not to smile.

They talked little, but the silences were comfortable. Dad seemed disinclined to discuss his case any further, but he also didn't press Andrew to talk. They'd had many quiet meals together over the years; only the fact that he'd been the one to cook, and the blandness of mashed potatoes made with no butter, made it different from any number of nights in 1935.

He watched his own hands on the cutlery. _How long is it they say it takes until all the cells in a human body have been exchanged for new ones? How much of me hasn't changed since I left Oxford, and how much is entirely new?_ _How long before these aren't the hands that were on the stick?_ For a moment he felt almost dizzy with the memory of the metal body of the Spit vibrating around him as it moved from lumbering along the ground to soaring into the air.

As they began to clear the table he felt a wave of something like vertigo, similar if not as strong as the disorientation of the day before, as he wondered briefly if he'd imagined the cold blue world hundreds of feet above this bright cozy box. The near-dizziness passed, but it left a shadow. Not the black terror that had driven him to run away in '41, nor the gray exhaustion that had plagued him in Debden, but something similar. A fog; a hollowness; a restless weariness; a nervous apprehension.

"I'll do the washing up," Dad said, when Andrew reached for the soap flakes. "Put the wireless on?"

"D'you mind not? The quiet's… nice," he finished awkwardly, unable to explain the revulsion he felt at the thought of an announcer's voice flooding the kitchen. Dad looked at him searchingly, but just nodded and turned up his sleeves.

Andrew went for his cigarette case and matches, and let himself out into the garden. At least the tremors held off until after he'd gotten his cigarette lit. He sat down on the step and tried hard to feel comforted by smoke and the homely sounds of Dad pottering in the kitchen.

"Day was all right?" Dad asked, as he closed the dishes away in the dresser.

"Yes. Fine."

"Good to see Sam?"

Andrew thought again of the sight of her, the smell of her, the touch of her lips. He could remember the feelings of happiness, and relief, but they seemed far off, like a memory of something he'd read long ago. He'd have thought it was fatigue making him numb, but the crushing ache of disappointment - no, disgust - at his own lack of response put the lie to that. "Yeah," he said roughly. With a shaking hand he brought the cigarette to his lips. _If she were here, I'd feel different. Feel right. But oh, Christ, if I didn't… if I can't…_

Dad sat down beside him. It was very quiet. In the mounting shadows neither the pile of debris from the Fullers' Anderson, nor the bunting in the streets, showed. "Cold?" he said, when Andrew shuddered.

"No." Andrew blew smoke in the other direction. "Sorry, d'you want me to take this…" With his cigarette he motioned down the garden.

"No."

If it had been Sam beside him, he'd have leaned against her. Thinking of it set up a hollow ache in his chest. _How can I, one minute, feel nothing at all when I think of her, and then the next feel sick because she's not here?_

"Do you, um." Dad shifted on the step. "Want to… talk about it?"

"Talk about _what?"_ Andrew snapped. "What's to say?"

Dad folded his hands together and let them hang between his knees.

"Keep cringing over nothing at all." He watched ash drift to the ground. "Bloody lunatic."

"You asked me," Dad said, after a long pause, "if… I'd killed anyone."

Oh, he wasn't numb, not at all, because the shame of that hurt as if he'd put the burning end of the cigarette against his own thigh. "I did. I'm so-"

"D'you remember what I said?"

He remembered that Dad had been more gentle than he deserved, for putting that unforgivable question. "You said… you get through it." _And I held on to that as best I could._

"Yes." Only Dad could make a single syllable at once that short and that definitive. "And you get through this as well. Andrew," he said, putting a hand on Andrew's where it rested on the step. "You get through this as well."

In the dim twilight, with the kitchen light flooding from behind them, Andrew couldn't see his father's face, but the urgent repetition and the coiled-spring tension of his bent shoulders were eloquent. "Did _you_ sick up your guts for no reason?" he demanded.

"In a gutter. In Broad Street," Dad answered. "Mid-morning. Full police uniform." A pause. "And. Broke my mother-in-law's crystal decanter trying to pour when my hands…" Dad's fingers tightened over his.

Andrew thought, suddenly, of the fishing line dancing over the water. Tying flies took a steady hand, but fishing itself might be more forgiving. He looked at Dad's bowed head and tried to imagine him younger than Andrew could remember, younger than Andrew was now. "Really?" he asked, his voice like a little boy's.

A nod.

"And… dreams?"

Another. "Don't know how your mum… got any rest. At points." Dad took a long breath. "So I. Do know. When I tell you. Takes time, but."

"You get through it," Andrew repeated.

"Yes."

They sat very still in the deepening dusk.

"It was smoke, for me," Dad said.

Andrew's breath caught, and caught again. He didn't sob, but he curled forward, shaking worse than ever. Now, though, it felt like something unspooling: a relief, rather than being trussed up tighter and tighter. He turned his free hand over to clutch Dad's. Dad gripped him back.

The trembling passed sooner than he would have thought. When it became too awkward to be hunched over with his arms out, he straightened up and Dad let his hand go. Andrew took a last pull on his cigarette, then moved to stub it out.

"Don't have to."

"Saving it for later." Andrew checked that it was cool, then put it away in his case. He shifted closer to Dad on the step. Dad didn't move, but Andrew could feel an infinitesimal relaxation that was, from him, nearly the same thing. "Thanks," he said into the darkness.

His father made a gruff little sound, like a verbal shrug. "Glad to."

"Liar. You hate talking about yourself."

"No, no. Not if it helps."

"It helps." Andrew studied his now-steady hands. "I mean it, Dad, thank you."

"You're welcome," he answered softly.


	3. Chapter 3

When he pushed open the swinging doors of the Hastings Police Station late the next morning, Andrew felt himself suddenly ten again, sent with a note for Dad (more as a means to occupy him while Mum was shopping than out of any need), or fifteen and bound, after a spell of poor behavior, to sit and wait for his father to finish work rather than going home from school on his own recognizance. Under the smell of wartime bureaucracy (a mixture of damp sand in bags or fire-buckets, damp carbon paper, and just plain damp), the air inside still had the familiar tang of metal, floor wax, and stewed tea. No one stood behind the desk, but a pair of uniformed men were at work in the lobby, filling boxes under the direction of a sergeant with curly dark hair and a London accent.

"...letters for the boxes, numbers for the pieces. Oh! Sorry, sir, can I help?" The sergeant lowered his clipboard as Andrew approached.

"Not really, thanks." Andrew took off his cap. "I mean, it's not a police matter, I'm just looking in to see if Mi-, if my father's free for lunch."

"You must be Squadron Leader Foyle. Welcome home, sir. You're the dead spit of your dad, if you don't mind me saying. Sergeant Brooke." He put out his hand.

"Pleasure, Sergeant." Andrew shook it. "You took over from Rivers, is that right?"

"Yes, sir, and it's been a privilege. Oi, Jenks!" Brooke turned in response to a thump. "We're meant to be moving it, not destroying it! Sorry," he said to Andrew. "Mr. Foyle's out just now, but if you'd like to wait in his office…"

"Would I be in the way here?" Andrew tilted his head towards the visitors' bench that ran along the wall.

"Not at all, sir, but it is noisy."

"That's all right. Thank you." Andrew sat down and pulled his notebook from his pocket. So that was the "Brookie" of Sam's letters. He was older than Andrew'd expected, though of course anyone under sixty would seem young after Rivers, who'd been as much a part of the station as the fire-buckets or the swing doors.

He flipped rapidly past the pages where he'd practiced the few principles of perspective that Mum had tried (mostly without success) to teach him. Nothing seemed to disrupt natural British reticence like the sight of someone drawing, and the soothing rhythm of graphite on paper wasn't worth the risk of strangers (or, worse, acquaintances who'd remember Mum) peering curiously over his shoulder. People were quicker to understand that writing might be private, so he wrote.

He wrote about letting himself in to the empty house; he wrote about Amanda no-longer-Fuller's little girl; he wrote about Rex. The station was noisy, but it was a steady, living sort of noise, a sort that soothed rather than unsettled him. The telephone made him start, and turned his letters wobbly, but it didn't make him dash for the lav, for which he was grateful.

It had been about three-quarters of an hour when the doors swung open for Dad and Sergeant Milner, deep in conversation, with Sam close at their heels. She'd taken trouble with her hair while keeping it properly off her collar; Andrew didn't know the terms for it, but he could tell it was fuller behind her ears and swirled more elaborately at the temples.

When she saw him he understood what Dad had meant the night before about "a walking blackout violation." It wasn't so much that she smiled as that a light seemed to go on under her skin. He ducked his head, torn between pleasure in seeing her happy and nervousness about his ability to live up to that joy.

"...Ziegler's records," Milner was saying. "For any other familiar names among the patients, and get on to the War Office for information about Griffith's service record."

"Yes. Also not a bad idea to put someone on looking up, um, Longmate's service exemption. And try the Americans for whatever they'll give us about what their people were doing in Devon. Andrew." Dad's voice warmed.

"Dad. Sorry to…"

"No, no." _All right?_ his smile asked.

 _All right_ , Andrew answered with a nod.

"Brooke, I'll need you to make a trunk call. This is the number; put it through to my office as soon as you've got it."

"Right away, Mr. Foyle." Brooke handed his clipboard to one of the constables and took the slip of paper.

"Would you like a cup of tea?" Sam offered.

"Would you like some lunch?" he countered.

She beamed, then looked to Dad.

"May need you," Dad said. " _If_ you can manage another hour without wasting away." His eyes flicked between them, and one corner of his mouth curled up.

"Yes, sir."

"Oh, Miss Stewart," Brooke said, from behind the desk, "Studdock and Norrell are trying to pack the records for the garage and… a bit of your assistance might smooth things."

"Oh, gosh. Sir?"

"My office, when you're done." Dad nodded.

"I'll make tea, then," Andrew felt a pleasant shiver down his spine when Sam smiled right in his eyes as she passed. "How many men have you, Sergeant Brooke?"

"Best just make half a pot, sir, there's so much to and fro. Very kind, thank you." Brooke held the inner door for him, then went to the telephone as Andrew made his way down the corridor towards the kitchen. He couldn't be sure, but it seemed Sam had left her mark there. Certainly the shelves seemed tidier, and the heavy china better sorted, than he remembered, but Andrew paid more attention to such things now than he had before.

He had one bad moment while the kettle was boiling, when something in the lobby dropped with a bang that nearly shot him out of his skin, but he put his hands on the cold enamel of the sink and was able to steady down. When the tea was made he took three cups out to Brooke and the others, then put the pot and three more cups on a tray to bring to Dad's office. He knocked with his foot and Milner opened the door.

"It's got to be one of them," Milner said to Dad, clearly continuing a well-established discussion. "They were both in the room. Or it could have been that curator chap, I suppose. Michael Brown."

"Could've been me," Dad raised an eyebrow to Andrew.

"Didn't like to mention it, sir," Sam said, peering into a packing crate as she ticked items off a list.

The look Dad gave her, a sort of bright-eyed exasperation, was one Andrew knew better from straight on than from alongside. Undeterred, Sam made a final tick mark and set the lid on the crate before coming to take possession of the teapot. Dad shook his head when she looked a question at him, so she stirred in a splash of milk and handed the first cup to Andrew.

"There's Longmate's assistant, as well, the one who took the minutes." Milner smiled his thanks to Sam when she gave him a cup without milk.

"Miss Hylton?"

"Mrs, I think. I met her a few days ago with Edith. They were both patients of Dr Ziegler."

Dad wrote his initials on a form and folded it up into an envelope. "Know what he was treating her for?"

"No, but I have a pretty good idea. With your permission, I'd like to talk to her while you're away."

"Certainly."

Andrew looked at Sam. She widened her eyes and shook her head as she hastily set her teacup down. "Where are you going, sir?"

"London." He capped his fountain pen and tucked it safely away in his jacket pocket. "You're about to run me to the station."

Sam dropped her chin. "Can I ask _why_ you're going to London, sir?"

"'Course you can," Dad answered. He got up, pushed his chair in neatly, and went to the coat tree for his hat and overcoat. Sam watched him, expectantly at first, and then with resignation. She glanced at Milner, who raised one shoulder slightly, and the two of them shared a silent sigh.

Andrew took a large swallow of tea and tried to force the burst of irrational jealousy down with it. "May I ride along?" he asked.

" _Try_ not to distract my staff," Dad said, but he smiled as he put on his hat.

* * *

"When should I be back for you, sir?" Sam asked, drawing up in front of the railway station.

"No, no, I'll make my own way. Not sure what train I'll be on. Don't wait dinner," he added to Andrew.

"Wasn't going to." Andrew tipped his head towards Sam. Dad gave him a look that tried to be disapproving but fell short. "Be careful," Andrew added. He realized, as the words left his mouth, that it was what Mum always said when Dad came back to the breakfast table, overcoat on and hat in hand, to kiss her goodbye. He swallowed, but Dad just nodded.

"Usual time tomorrow, Sam, please." He swung out of the car and held the passenger door for Andrew to take his place.

"Yes, sir." They watched him cross the pavement, and then Sam put the car in gear. "Where shall we go?"

The day seemed to yawn before them, vast and empty. "The seafront?"Andrew suggested, after an awkward pause.

"All right. Just up to Rock-a-nore, maybe? And we could get fish and chips."

"Poor Sam, are you starved?" He put a hand over hers where it rested on the gearshift.

The corner of her mouth turned down, but she answered, "Not _terribly."_

"Fish and chips it is."

She grinned, then frowned apologetically as she flexed her wrist. "You're making it difficult to shift."

"Sorry." He pulled his hand back, feeling foolishly bereft.

"Don't be, it's lovely. Just not very practical."

Andrew nodded, and could not find anything else to say. He watched Sam's smooth competence at the wheel and wondered why it only deepened the hollow feeling in his chest. She seemed at once absolutely familiar and entirely alien. It had felt unsettling to see her at work in the station, to watch her and Dad and Milner together. He'd known the three of them were close, but seeing the easy efficiency of it, the very way they moved through the corridors together, was something else again. He hadn't been prepared for how Dad was with them: the quiet satisfaction when he listened to Milner, the quiet affection when he looked at Sam. _Would he have liked_ me _to be a policeman?_ Andrew wondered. And then, _would he have liked a daughter?_

Sam parked the car in All Saints Street, but as soon as they got out she ran back the way they'd come to a house where a woman was trying to navigate a pram down her front steps. Andrew waited by the car, then followed slowly when Sam kept chatting with the mother and making faces at the baby.

"He's quite a big boy, isn't he, for seven months?" she was saying when he caught up.

The mother beamed. "Oh, yes, he grows so fast I can hardly keep him dressed!"

"Well, he's absolutely lovely. Don't let that go your head," Sam added to the baby.

Andrew thought it looked much like any baby, but he smiled in what he hoped was a polite fashion.

"Thanks ever so." With a fond look at her child, the mother turned the pram towards the Old Town.

"He's called Jonathan," Sam said, taking Andrew's hand as they moved in the opposite direction. "I think that's a really lovely name. He could be called Jon if he likes, but he'll also have the long name if he wants it."

"Mm."

"And it's Biblical but it doesn't sound Puritan, not like Lemuel or Silas."

"Do you know any Lemuels?"

"No, but my father had to baptize a Naphtali once. He did try to encourage the parents to choose Benjamin, or Joseph, or even Reuben or Levi… still sons of Jacob, you know, but a bit more popular..." She trailed off and tightened her fingers on his. "Andrew. Are you all right?"

"What? Yes, fine. Didn't sleep very well," he admitted, seeing Sam's expression. "That's all."

She nodded, but tension lingered at the corners of her mouth. Andrew looked up to the pale bright sky and drew a deep breath of the sea air. _She saw something that needed doing, so she did it. She's like that; she's always been like that._

There was a chippie across from the first of the net huts of the Stade; Andrew bought just chips for himself, more to keep Sam company than out of any desire of his own. The first bite nearly turned his stomach, but fortunately Sam was too busy with the salt and vinegar to notice his grimace. "Thank you," she said, when she'd swallowed her first bite of fish. "I think they may actually have found some cod! Sure you won't have some of your own?"

"Yes. I had breakfast late."

"Well, you can have a bit of mine, if you change your mind, but I'm warning you, you haven't long to think about it."

Sam ate tidily, even walking with a newspaperful of fish and chips, but she also ate with evident enjoyment that it had always given Andrew pleasure to watch. Even at that disastrous tea when he was home on crash leave in the second autumn of the war, he'd noticed how her closed lips made sweet kissable shapes as she chewed. He could still see the shapes, but the pleasure seemed to be on the other side of a pane of glass.

 _But you can act right even if you don't feel right,_ he told himself. "How's the case?"

"Complicated. Everyone's very bad-tempered, even Major Kieffer who I wouldn't have thought _could_ be. And I can't imagine what's up in London, unless it's something from Dr. Ziegler's past."

"Major Kieffer? What's he have to do with it?"

"He's on this committee with Mr. Foyle."

"Does that make _him_ a suspect?"

Her mouth full, Sam nodded. "Not a likely one, but procedure…"

"Procedure," Andrew agreed, with a grim memory of his own turn under suspicion, just before Rex went down. _And it could have been me going down. Easily. Why wasn't it me?_

"Andrew?"

"Fine. Sorry. Thinking… thinking that must be rotten for Dad."

"Yes." She rubbed a chip against the newspaper to pick up more salt. "They'd been such friends while the captain - major - was posted here."

Andrew nodded and picked at his own chips. The cliff rose up on their left hand before the buildings on their right gave way to shingle and the choppy gray sea. The shore looked undressed without the barbed wire. "I got us a table at the Cafe Anglais for seven," he said. "If that's all right."

"Oh. Thank you. But I… I can't."

He swallowed and nodded again, and looked away.

"There's a meeting of the married families club at SSAFA tonight and I said I'd help mind the children. I'd really rather not throw them over," Sam went on. She sounded nervous, which only made him feel worse. "There are a few positions they might consider me for, and it would be such a relief to have _something_."

 _Mind the children. Children._ "'Course. I should have asked first. Sorry."

"I…" Sam scuffed her toe into the pebbles of the shore. "I was thinking you might call last night," she said. "But I should have asked before I went to work, not assumed."

"No. I'm sorry," he said again.

"It's all right." Sam let out a sigh. "Here, are you sure you won't have a bit?" She held out the last half-piece of fish.

"No, thanks." He smiled hesitantly. "You finish."

Her eyes flicked to his chips, but she nodded and tucked in. He managed to get a portion of his own food down by remembering that the regulations on wasting food were still in effect, but even that only carried him so far. Sam frowned when he offered the remainder to her, but she ate some and they threw the last few to the gulls before folding up the newspaper to use for starting fires.

"Do… do you know know if you'll go back up to Oxford?" Sam asked, as she buttoned the newspaper away in a lower pocket of her tunic.

"I _just_ got home, Sam, and the war's not even properly over yet. Give a chap a moment to think," Andrew snapped.

She dropped her eyes.

"Sorry," he repeated, in a milder voice. "It's a fair question, I just…"

"Of course."

Andrew's chest felt at once hollow and heavy, and his head was starting to ache. "I'm not very amusing today, I'm afraid," he said. "Look, let's just try again tomorrow, all right? I'll change the reservation, and I'll… Sam?"

She'd stopped walking. "I…" She swallowed and he could hear, in the silence, the click of her glass on the bar and the low _I hate it when you're like this_ that had ended some of their early evenings together. "I wish you wouldn't say that sort of thing. Do you think that's what I want?" Her voice was like flint. "If I wanted to be amused, I'd have married Joe. And if you wanted to be amused, you'd have married Vi, or…" She broke off and turned out to sea.

 _Or Kate,_ Andrew supplied _._ Even furious, she was too kind - too scrupulous of their agreement to treat everything from before as finished - to throw Kate at him.

"That's not, that's _never_ been, what it was, for me. I thought you knew that." She folded her arms across her chest.

He thought of the golden September evening they'd seen _Gone With The Wind_ , and the cold January afternoon they'd gone to tea in St. Leonard's, and the day he'd opened the front door to find a beautiful girl who didn't seem impressed at all by his uniform, or his smile, or his best lines. "Maybe I did," he admitted, swallowing back the urge to apologize again."I don't... seem to be very sensible just now."

Sam raised her chin, still looking towards France. "Are you... unhappy, or just unhappy seeing me?"

"Not unhappy seeing you," he said, keeping his voice even, despite the bottomless pit he felt opening up beneath his feet. _One thing to do, one thing, and you can't even do that. Not even to make her happy, just to not hurt her any worse than you already did, but even that's beyond you._ "And not like when I was AWOL. But the stupidest things make me go to bits, and I hate… I hate the idea of you being kind to me when I'm just being a fool."

She turned towards him, her jaw still set but her mouth a little softer. "You were kind to me," she said. "When I folded up like a Victorian maiden over three bars of organ music."

"That wasn't the music. Not really. You were exhausted." He put a cautious hand on her sleeve, remembering the shock of watching her face crumple after she snapped for him to switch off the wireless.

"And you're not?"

"It was different," Andrew protested. "You..."

Sam pulled back. "Because I'm a girl?"

"No! But you'd been nursing Dad all by yourself for days."

"And you think that's worse than fighting the Jerries? Worse than being _shot_ at, tens of thousands of feet in the air in a tin box full of oxygen cylinders and ammunition and high-octane petrol, for _years?"_ She looked fierce. "Are you _cracked?"_

It was so exactly what he _was_ afraid of that Andrew had to turn away. "But that's over. It's all over. It shouldn't…" His voice didn't break, but it wobbled.

"You didn't think I was mad, did you, that I went to bits almost a full day after we knew he was going to be all right?"

"Of course not." All he'd thought, in that instant, was how very badly he wanted to take her in his arms.

"Then why do you think you are?"

Andrew shut his eyes. "Don't be kind to me," he whispered.

Her hand came to rest lightly on his shoulder. "Why not?"

"Don't _deserve_ it," he managed, after a moment.

"Why not?" she asked again.

He shook his head. "Others were better," he said. "Better fliers. Better… men. Charlie. Tommy. Douglas." He swallowed. "Rex."

"They're not here. You are."

Andrew trembled on the edge of speaking for a long moment before he let the words come in a rough undertone. "Don't deserve that either."

"To be alive?" She didn't sound fierce now, only quiet. "Oh, Andrew. Oh, _Andrew."_ She put her arms around him as he let out a long, shuddering breath.

"No, not your… don't… no…" He was afraid he'd crush her if he held on the way he wanted to, so he only turned his face to her shoulder and hugged his arms tight around his own chest.

"Have you been thinking that all this time?"

He shrugged.

"Let's sit down. Over here. Come on." Sam drew him over to a boulder against the cliff wall, and rubbed her hands over his arms as he shivered. "Is… is it better if I don't touch…?"

" _No!"_ He grabbed her hands to hold them in place, then forced his grip to loosen. "Sorry, did I hurt you, sorry…"

"No. I'll say if you do."

"Dad, Dad says… it gets better, but I don't… I don't know how…" He smacked the flat of his palm against the rock. "Damn it!" His teeth rattled as if they'd shake themselves loose.

"You got through the dark before." Sam sat down very close beside him. "It can _be_ got through."

"I don't want to drag you into it."

Sam made a breathy sound, a laugh with an edge of tears in it. "It's much too late for that." She touched his cheek and made him look at her. "It's been too late for a long time now."

He tried to look away, but her fingers were strong.

"So tell me," she said. "Please."

He shuddered against her, but couldn't bring himself to speak.

"When we…" She pressed her lips together. "Those first few months. While you were posted down here. Do you know when I felt the very closest to you, out of all that time?"

Had there been good times, before he went to Debden, before he ruined everything, before Sam - with staggering generosity - opened the door for them to put things back together? Andrew tried to remember, but his skittish thoughts wouldn't settle. All he could feel was guilt. He shook his head.

"The night you were AWOL." Sam's fingers traced the shoulder seam of his tunic.

It seemed impossible. "Really?"

Sam nodded, her mouth tight and earnest. "I hated that you were so awfully frightened and, and unhappy, but I… it meant so much that you came to me, would come to me. That you told me, even the things that were terrible to hear. You told me. Wanted to tell me. Wanted us to be together."

"But I said… Sam. I said terrible things. I put you in a completely unfair…"

"You put me in a completely unfair position _later_. That night, you told me the truth." Her dark eyes were sad, but clear. "Please tell me the truth."

"It feels like I'm going mad," he whispered.

Sam didn't speak, but pressed even closer.

"I don't feel anything at all, or I'm furious, or I… I feel right for a moment, and it's even worse afterwards when the bottom drops out of my heart."

Sam nodded.

"I was sick," he blurted out. "In the kitchen sink, yesterday, when the phone rang. It wasn't… it wasn't the first time. The… in the dispersal hut, the phone…"

"I remember you saying." Sam kept one arm around his shoulders but clasped his hand in one of hers. "How awful it was, wondering what it was going to be."

"But it's _over,_ why should it hurt now when it's over?"

"Why shouldn't it?" Sam asked. "You couldn't think about it before. You couldn't let yourself think about it before. It's not cracked to feel it now." She squeezed his hand. "Andrew. It's… the _sane_ thing to feel it now."

"To be sick when I hear a _telephone?_ "

"Rather than being sick in your oxygen mask, and choking to death? Yes."

She sounded very certain. He took a breath that he had to fight to keep from being a gulp. "Yeah?"

"Yeah."

He turned his hand over so he could intertwine his fingers with hers. "The most lunatic part is… it's horrible to remember and yet I think I… miss it. The dawn patrol. Breaking through the clouds into sunshine. The instant the wheels lift off the airstrip and you're suddenly weightless."

"Of course you miss it. Especially when you never got to… say goodbye. Didn't know, the last time you flew, that it'd be the last time." She lifted her hand from where it rested on his shoulder to stroke his left temple under his cap. "For weeks now I've been patting the Wolseley every night as if it were a horse, as if I might never see it again. And every time I sit with a witness, or even ask Brookie what happened overnight, I feel I ought to take a photograph."

"That's true," he said slowly. "I didn't know. The last time, all I could think while I was going up was 'get the job done' and all I could think while I was coming down was how… how my head ached worse and worse until I thought it'd burst before I landed."

"Poor head." Sam kissed his other temple. "Does it still ache?"

"Off and on." But not, he realized, now. "That seems to be the least of it."

"You're not mad," Sam said. "Sometimes… sometimes a bit of an idiot, but you're not mad."

Andrew laughed. It hurt coming through his tight throat, but it was a satisfying sort of hurt, like stretching the day after a rugby match, or pulling off a scab. "Sometimes more than a bit."

She smiled, then settled her head on his shoulder. "Andrew," she said, after a long moment. "About deserving things… do you want to know what I think?"

A new shudder went through him, down to his toes, but he nodded. "Yes. Please."

"I don't think any of it is about deserving. Not the good things that happen, nor the bad. You don't have to work out why your number didn't come up. We, you, can just be glad it didn't."

"I should be, shouldn't I. Glad." He turned towards her. "I should be."

"If you can't be now, it's all right. I can be glad for both of us." Her smile was a little sad, and more than a little worried, but her hand was steady when she cupped his cheek again. "For a while, anyway."

"Just for a while," Andrew agreed. "I… I am trying not to wallow."

"I know," she said softly. "I can tell. Just, please don't try so hard that you shut me out."

"I'll do my best. Not sure how good that'll be."

Sam leaned in to kiss him. "With your best and my best I think we'll do all right. We're rather good in tough spots, remember."

"I suppose we are." He kissed her back, cautiously at first and then, when she opened her lips to his, with more force. She made a soft noise of longing and slid one hand up the back of his neck in a way that sent a thrill down his spine. Sam shivered against him and he broke the kiss, though he kept her close. "How long have we been sitting here?" He shook his watch free of his shirtcuff. "Sweetheart, your legs must be icicles." The endearment slipped out before he could consider it.

"I'm not cold. Well, I suppose I am, a bit, but that's not why…" She let out a shaky breath. "Nothing makes me feel like you do," Sam said, very low. "So think of that, when you feel you're not good enough."

"All right," he said, when he could be confident his voice would stay steady. "Now, come on, let's get out of the wind and find a pint. I'm starting to wish I hadn't given those chips to the gulls."

"Good." Sam stood up and dusted off the skirt of her tunic and the seat of her skirt. "It's not the same as missing flying, I know," she said, as they walked back towards the car, "But I said the stupidest thing to your father last week. That I wished the war'd go on another year. I didn't, really, I don't, of course, and it's not like I've done anything so very much, but I will miss the police. Quite terribly."

"Of course you will. You understand Dad well enough to know how much he's depended on you, even with how damned close-mouthed he always is. And I could see today how Brooke and the rest of them respect you. You've been brilliant." He took her hand.

"Just by chance, mostly." Sam ducked her head in the way that meant she was pleased but thought she ought not to be.

"It wasn't chance that you knocked out that blighter with a bin lid." Andrew nodded at the net huts. "And that was just the start." It occurred to him, as he watched her face light with a shyly proud smile, how many times _her_ number might have been up. The bomb in Taybury Woods, and the one dropped on her digs; the madman with the gun in The King's Head, and the one with a knife in a garage. The anthrax. He squeezed her fingers and with his other hand brushed the scar on her wrist.

Sam covered his hand with hers and looked up curiously.

"You _are_ brilliant," he said.

"Buy me a drink, then," Sam answered, and grinned.


	4. Chapter 4

Andrew woke gradually to a warm weight over his feet, dim light on his closed eyelids, and the faint scratching of a pen. He kept still, savoring the fragile peace, knowing there was another, harsher waking to come. He did not let himself wonder whether it would be the bustle of the base hospital or the rumble of the barracks. He tried not to allow the thought that it might be Bruce's sitting room at college; that he'd had too long a sleep, too long a dream, when he went round after an early lecture at Merton to rouse Bruce for his tute and then take advantage of the comfortable sofa there.

The relation of the light and the bed (it was a bed, he could feel a sheet) were wrong for that, though. Wrong, but familiar. His own rooms at college? What had he drunk last night, to dream so hard?

He opened his eyes, and had to squeeze them shut again at once against a sting that wasn't all the sudden light. The scene stayed on the inside of his eyelids, vivid as a Caravaggio: his own room at home, the bedside lamp moved to the desk, Dad writing by it in his shirtsleeves with his cufflinks and the clip of his fountain pen shining in the light. Andrew couldn't tell if the piercing feeling in his chest was joy at being home or grief that everything else had been real.

He must have made a noise, because the scratching stopped and the chair creaked as Dad moved, as if to come sit on the edge of the bed as he had in the long suffocating nights when neither of them could sleep. Andrew knew he couldn't bear that without the tears spilling over. He opened his eyes again.

"Wake you?" Dad said softly. "Sorry." He put a hand out towards the lamp.

Andrew shook his head. "No. Time's it?"

"Not quite midnight. You can…"

"No." He stretched beneath the covers, wriggling his toes under the soothing pressure of the folded eiderdown at the foot of the bed, and turned onto his side. "You just back?"

"Few hours."

"Find what you wanted in town?"

Dad made an equivocal motion with his head. "Was worthwhile." In the half light his face was soft with weariness. "Have a good evening?"

"Sam had to work. Minding the kids for a meeting of the Married Families Club at SSAFA. I got a bite at the Red Lion and walked her home after." He tucked his arm under his pillow and drew his knees up slightly, curling in with the memory of watching Sam gently disentangle small fingers from her hair. "Thought it might get a bit rough in the streets, people annoyed to still be waiting, but it was fine."

"Good." Dad wrote another line, then capped his pen and slid the paper closer to the lamp to let the ink dry.

"Working late," Andrew observed.

He shook his head. "Letter. No one you know," he added, before the question formed on Andrew's lips.

"All right, have your secrets."

Dad smiled and sat back in the desk chair, fiddling idly with a button on his open waistcoat.

The wind sighed through the back garden, making the oak branches creak, a sound so familiar Andrew hadn't known he missed it before this moment. "Weren't sitting up with me, were you?"

"I wasn't ready to sleep."

Andrew studied him carefully. "You all right?"

"Yes, fine." He looked to the shaded window. "Just thinking." A moment passed. "Milner's with his wife at St. Mary's," he went on. "May be a father by now."

"He going to ring you?"

"No, no, no, don't expect it. But, no family of his own other than Mrs. Milner." Dad made a little shrugging motion with his mouth. "So, perhaps. When the baby."

Again, as at the station, Andrew had an uncomfortable pang of envy and uncertainty, as if he'd been supplanted while he was away. "Lucky little mite," he said, around a yawn. "Born in a world without war."

All at once the quiet room felt even quieter. Dad had gone very still, his eyes fixed on something beyond their reach. "That's what Rosalind said about you." His voice was rough. "Day you were born. She..." he let out a breath and for a long moment Andrew thought that was all he would say, but he went on. "Said you wouldn't ever know… that."

 _Rosalind_. Her name hung in the air. How many years had it been, Andrew wondered, since he'd heard Dad say it? Surely, when the first shock had faded, he'd used it with Uncle Charles, even if with Andrew it had always been 'your mum,' and with others 'my wife.' But Andrew could only remember the sound of it when mum was alive. It had been a hopeful question when Dad came in from work; a sigh of admiration when she showed him a new picture; a rumble of annoyance when she told him to stay off a wrenched ankle. And then, nothing. Just that aching, hollow _she._

He studied Dad's bent head. "What did mum do? In the last war? Other than knit a battalion's worth of socks," he added.

"Two battalions, I think, by the end." Dad didn't look at him, but he smiled, and it was a softer, less sad smile than Andrew had feared. "She'd have liked to be a VAD, but her parents didn't approve of such training for young ladies. So, she rolled bandages, and played in Red Cross concerts, and collected suitable reading material for convalescent soldiers. Eventually, she met people working on prosthetics for…" He moved a hand towards his face. "She never liked oil paints, but she was very good at matching colors. Even difficult things like skin. She'd do it in watercolor and then copy it in oil on the tin mask." He shifted in the chair. "It wasn't... women weren't called up, then. Had to volunteer."

"Like Sam," Andrew pointed out.

"Like Sam." Dad tipped his head.

What would it be, to come home not to the remnants of his childhood, but to marriage, and fatherhood? To Sam and a tiny bundle, tinier even than the baby she'd been grinning at in All Saints Street? Andrew sat up and hugged his knees. "Dad. _Do_ you ever think of marrying again?"

"Do you ever think of marrying at all?" he shot back. The quirk of his lips spoke of teasing, but his hand, Andrew saw, had gone tight on his button.

"Didn't seem… lucky… to think too much about it during the war."

Dad's mouth turned wry. "And now?"

Andrew shrugged again. It struck him suddenly as unfair that he couldn't bring Sam to meet Dad. That he had no way, short of a proposal, to signal seriousness of purpose. But if Dad hadn't met Sam first, he'd never have met Sam at all, and certainly never encountered her after he'd gone up to Debden in '41. The whole courtship had been backwards that way, from their first meeting on the doorstep when she came to drive Dad to work, to their second chance after the days of nursing Dad side by side nearly as if they were already married.

And of course, they'd never have met at all if it weren't for the war.

He thought of her heart beating against him, and the light in her eyes, and the warm touch of her hands. But also the hurt and the anger in her voice. That he put in her voice.

"I just got home, Dad," he said. The silence stretched on. Andrew stared at the lumps of his feet under the bedclothes. In those first few years after Mum, he'd thought often and with dread of some strange woman sweeping in to make them a family of three again, but an alien family. And as he'd grown he'd thought often, if indistinctly, of himself with some anonymous pretty wife and hazy-faced children.

With Violet, and Kate, and other girls, there'd been the sense that he'd have to choose: the family he came from, or the family he made. At best, he'd thought, he'd always be interpreting one to the other. But Sam would never need Dad explained to her, and he'd never need to argue her virtues to Dad. To be home with both Dad and Sam seemed natural, strange only when he had to remind himself that it had never happened outside those few days in '43.

Andrew pleated the edge of the sheet. "How did you know? You and mum."

The chair creaked. "Well. Was rather a different time."

"Dad. Please?" He looked over to his father.

Dad pulled in the corner of his mouth, then raised his eyebrows in an expression of uncharacteristic helplessness. "Can't speak for her," he said. "Don't know how she… just, that she did. Very grateful she did," he added softly.

"You, then. How'd you know."

He spread his hands on his knees. Outside, the wind sighed again. "In the army," he began. "What… wore on me. More constantly even than the waiting…" His eyes flicked to Andrew. _You know the waiting._

Andrew nodded.

"The… living in public. No privacy. The _noise_ , not war, just men."

Andrew nodded once more, though Dad's eyes were far away.

"When I. Was sent home, I... longed for... solitude. But I found that Rosalind, sitting with Rosalind was... restful as being alone." He raised his head and let out a breath, then turned hesitantly to Andrew. "Does that…?"

 _Maybe_. "Yes," Andrew answered. "And… was it… being married, I mean… how you expected?"

"No." Dad was very still. Then he smiled, his eyes closing, and shook his head. "It was better. Unimaginably better."

Andrew hugged his knees tighter, as if that might ease the sudden tightness in his chest, an almost unendurable stirring of something he wasn't sure he could name. Pleasure? Hope? _Joy?_ His eyes stung.

And then, like the return of a pendulum, like the pull of a wave drawing back into the sea, came the memories. The dispersal hut; the Flamingo; light and shadow on the faces he'd known better than his own. Charlie. Douglas. Rex.

"Not fair to keep a young woman waiting," Dad said.

" _Fair."_ The word scraped through his chest like a sanding block. "How is this, any of this, _fair?_ That I…have a chance at that, and Rex, Rex and Connie…" His hands had curled into fists. He stretched his fingers and tried to breathe evenly. "Rex," he repeated.

"None of it's fair," Dad agreed, after a long silence. "But not much of that's your doing. The bad or the good."

 _I don't think any of it is about deserving,_ Sam had said. _Not the good things that happen, nor the bad._ Andrew stared at his hands and tried to believe it.

"Didn't know him as you did, of course, but. I have the impression… Andrew."

Andrew reluctantly raised his face to meet Dad's.

"That the last thing, the _very_ last thing, Rex would want, is your unhappiness."

 _Carry on for him_ , Dad had said, after Rex went down, when Andrew came and cried on his shoulder. At the time Andrew had only thought of flying ops, not of the rest of life. But it was what they'd fought for, wasn't it, for peace and safety and ordinary work, for weddings and babies?

And Rex himself, if Andrew had said _you deserve this more_ … he would have laughed the strange bitter laugh that came out of him at odd moments, and thumped him on the shoulder, and said _think I need your pity, Foyle?_

"And I wonder, are you afraid Sam will say no, or that she'll say yes?"

He had a nasty way of putting his finger on the crux of a problem. Andrew sighed. "Sam… you know how she has a way of… jumping into things, when she sees something that needs doing. Planting potatoes, or getting a pram down steps." Andrew gave his father a pointed look. "Nursing you through that bloody awful bronchitis."

Dad twisted his mouth and tilted his head. "All of those, even the, um, last… pretty strictly limited projects."

"Yeah."

"You were saying yesterday how strong she is. Not strong enough to know her own mind, though?"

Andrew flopped back on the pillow. "You're worse than a seminar in logic, you know that?"

Dad made a little _hmph_ of agreement that shifted into a yawn he covered with the back of his hand.

"Sorry. I'm keeping you up."

"No, no. I'm the one woke you."

"You didn't wake me." Andrew tucked an arm under his head. "But if you did I'd be glad." To his mild surprise, he found it wasn't a figure of speech. He was glad.

Dad smiled, and shuffled his papers together. "Go back to sleep," he said gruffly as he rose.

"Don't you stay up," Andrew countered.

He switched off the light. "Fuss, fuss, fuss."

"Dad?" Andrew asked, when he had the door half-closed. Dad didn't speak, but he stopped. "It's the last thing mum would have wanted, too, isn't it? You being unhappy."

Dad was quiet so long that once again Andrew thought he wouldn't answer at all, but finally, soft in the darkness, there came a single syllable. "Yes."


	5. Chapter 5

_Andrew had to get to the Examination Schools, but every street he started down doubled back on itself and every bus he boarded changed routes. At last he made it as far as Queen's but discovered he'd come away not only without his gown but without a stitch on aside from his flight jacket. He fled down Queen's Lane, tugging futilely at the hem of his jacket, and there, under the windows of the Warden of New College, he found Mum, Mum in the shapeless brown coat she wore for rambling in the country and the peacock-blue hat she'd had for best when Andrew was small. He stopped, aghast that he'd thought she was dead. She looked up, and saw him, and said "Andrew" in the voice that meant soap-left-in-the-water and message-not-delivered. He tried to cover himself with his hands, and woke with tears on his face._

"Mum," he said aloud to the patch of sunlight on the ceiling.

It was still early, but from the bathroom he could hear the dull _cling-cling-clink_ of Dad tapping his shaving brush on the edge of his soap mug. Andrew waited for the sounds of morning that it seemed must follow - the kettle singing, the kitchen door creaking, Mum calling "Andrew, are you _up_?"

Andrew raised his own hand and stared at it. A man's hand; a pilot's hand; a veteran's hand.

An empty hand.

When he heard Dad finish he hauled himself out of bed, pulled on his dressing gown, and slipped out into the passage. The door to the front bedroom stood open, and though it was sunlight and not lamplight spilling out for a moment Andrew's ribs tightened with memories: a cold February morning and Dad's strained voice saying _there's an ambulance coming, unlock the front door_ , a cold January night and Dad's thick rasping breaths. He steadied himself on the wall and went forward.

The bed was already made, as always. The ironing board stood between the windows where mum's dressing table had been. At the bureau Dad was buttoning his braces to his trousers. His eyes flicked up for a moment as Andrew came to sit on the side of the bed.

"Sleep all right?" he asked.

"Fine." Andrew studied the stiff line of his shoulders. "You can't have had much; do you have to go in on time?"

Dad opened a drawer. "Well, got to make an arrest first thing." He chose a pair of cufflinks and set them on the dresser top.

"It's not your friend, is it?"

"What?"

"The Yank. Sam told me he's on the committee with you."

"Umm…" Dad frowned as he fastened his cuffs. "Nnno, not arresting him."

"Oh, good."

Dad tilted his head.

Andrew fiddled with the hem of the counterpane. "Could I ask Sam to give me a lift this morning?"

"Where to?"

Andrew kept his eyes down. "Up to Hollington."

"Ah. To, um. To visit the churchyard?"

"Yeah."

"Could go together tomorrow," Dad said after a pause. "Unless you'd rather…?"

"Yeah, on my own, yeah. Maybe at the weekend, though?"

"Right."

"And. Dad. What happened to Mum's jewelry?"

Dad stopped in the act of turning up his collar for his tie to turn towards Andrew and widen his eyes.

"Just asking." Andrew stared back. "I mean, did Uncle Charles want anything for Aunt Nora, or did you put things in the bank, or…?"

 _Really_ , said Dad's face, but he finished with his collar and picked up his tie. "Wasn't much that was particularly valuable. One necklace of her mother's - we'd had it in the bank, she never wore it. That, I gave to Charles." He slid the Windsor knot into place, then turned his collar down. He opened the same drawer where he kept his cufflinks and drew out a flat white box topped with gray velvet. For an instant he stood, holding it in both hands, and then he thumbed the catch and opened the box as he set it down on the bed beside Andrew.

The velvet lining was pale blue; perhaps the cover had once been the same color and had faded from the sunlight falling across Mum's dressing table. Andrew trailed hesitant fingers over the contents: a slender gold wristwatch, a small pearl pendant he remembered her wearing often. Several brooches he had never seen. Half a dozen rings.

"I have. Her wedding ring. Also." Dad let out a breath. "Did you want to see…?" He touched his tie again.

"No. That's all right."

"Can do as you like with those." Dad turned away to shrug into his waistcoat.

Andrew turned over the rings. He didn't recognize most of them. One was so small he doubted Mum could have worn it after he'd come along, and a couple were impractically bulky. But one, old gold with a round red stone in a flat setting, he could picture on Mum's right hand as she turned pages in her sketchbook.

"You going to have a bath?" Dad asked.

Andrew looked at the clock. "Just sponge off, but I'll wipe the tub."

"Thanks. I'll get breakfast."

When Sam knocked Andrew checked, again, that his jacket pocket was buttoned securely over the battered Strepsils tin he'd found to hold the ring. He tried to school his face before he opened the door, but Sam's smile turned quickly to a slight, worried frown when she saw him. He shrugged and shook his head, trying to convey _it's nothing_ ; she nodded and turned to Dad. "Good morning, sir. How was London?"

"Morning, Sam. Useful." Dad locked the door behind them. "The Majestic first, please, and then would you mind running this one up to Hollington?" He tilted his head towards Andrew.

"Not at all." She paused for the briefest moment. "You won't need me at the hotel?"

"No, thank you. Need to look over some of the preparations on the Parade, better on foot. Do come back to the station, though."

"Of course." Sam glanced towards Andrew in the backseat as she prepared to put the car in gear. "I wouldn't miss hearing the Prime Minister with everyone there. Andrew, you should come along."

"All right." He eased his collar with a finger. In silence they delivered Dad to the hotel, and Andrew joined Sam in the front seat. Under the dashboard she put out her gloved hand, and Andrew squeezed it.

Her eyes stayed worried, but she smiled and squeezed back before putting the car in gear and setting off inland. "You don't need to tell me," Sam said. "But I have wondered why it's not at St. Clements. Your mother's grave."

"They were married at the Church in the Wood," Andrew explained. "And I think mum's grandparents… or maybe an uncle… had put up some of the money for it to be refurbished in the last century. Anyway, she liked it."

"It is lovely. I've never been to a service, though."

"I haven't for years. We used to be sure to go at Whitsunday, it's beautiful then, but after… Dad and I couldn't face it, I suppose."

"No," Sam agreed, with a sympathetic twist of her lips.

What traffic there was on the London road was going the other way, and they sailed up through Silverhill and out onto the rolling green hills. Andrew put his window down and the sweet cool morning smells of grass and earth mixed with the warm leather of the Wolseley.

"The turn comes up quick," he warned.

"Yes, I know."

"Of course you do. Sorry." Andrew touched her arm in apology. She'd have been there all the years Andrew had missed, waiting straight-backed by the car when Dad came back from his lonely visit to the churchyard.

It was cooler once they passed under the first trees shading the church lane, but the sun slipped through the leaves to make dazzling patches on the ground. Andrew closed his eyes for a moment as Sam pulled up.

"There's a bench just by the lych gate," she said, when they got out of the car. "I'll wait there."

Andrew nodded. He took a few steps, then turned back. "Sam… would you come with me?"

She looked up, her face open and surprised. "Oh! Of course. If you like. I thought you might want to be on your own."

"I thought I did. But I don't. Well. I mean, I'd like you." He put out his hand, and with a nod, she took it.

He braced himself for the vertiginous feeling of being lost in time, the feeling he'd had in the house that morning, and more than once since coming home, but the memories of the funeral were only pictures, not jolts to the gut. Here they'd followed the coffin; here Uncle Charles and the rest of the pallbearers had set it down; here had been a mound of earth that he and Dad took clods from to drop into the pit. No memories came with the sight of her name carved deep in the unadorned stone, but his eyes brimmed over silently as he crouched to touch the R with his free hand.

Sam knelt down beside him, her hand very warm around his, but she didn't speak.

"I wish…" His voice was stronger than he expected through the tears. "I wish you'd known her."

"I wish I had, too," Sam answered quietly.

He had nothing else to say, or even to think, but somehow that didn't worry him now. He crouched there, and wept, and Sam shifted closer and put her cheek against his shoulder, and that was all.

When he finally sat back on his heels the pain around his eye was back. He felt lightheaded, but also lighter than he had when he woke up. He let go of Sam's hand to get to his feet, but she stayed on her knees for a few moments more, then made a tiny cross with her thumb on the breast of her tunic before she stood.

"She'd have liked you," Andrew told her.

"Do you think so?"

He nodded. "Very much."

Sam dropped her eyes, smiling. The line of her lashes against the curve of her cheek was so lovely Andrew wanted to cry again. The box in his pocket felt as if it might burst into flame.

"Good morning!" someone called from the church porch.

Andrew almost bit his tongue swallowing a curse.

"Hello!" Sam sang back. Then, under her breath, she added, "Oh, gosh, lucky we weren't any later. It looks like a whole altar guild's here to tidy up. There must be a service planned. I'll talk to them, you take your time." She struck out between the gravestones, calling "I hope the car isn't in your way!" with the practiced cheer Andrew thought of as her vicar's-daughter voice.

Alone, he sniffed and wiped his eyes with his thumb. _I do think you'd like her, Mum,_ he thought. _I think she'd like you._

Sam's experienced eye had accurately summed up the situation: half a dozen women with a wheelbarrowload of cut flowers and another of cleaning implements and garden tools had come to make ready for a service of thanksgiving. Under their averted but interested eyes Andrew quietly urged Sam to go back to Hastings without him.

"I'm all right, but my head's a bit… I could use some air. It's only three miles."

"You'll come find me at the station?" She looked searchingly into his eyes - searching, but not worried, today.

"I will," he promised. He didn't dare to kiss her, not in front of an Altar Guild, but under the cover of the open car door he squeezed her hand, then waved as she drove off.

He took the quieter road back, through Gillmans Hill, turning the cough-sweet tin over and over in his pocket and feeling the soft dirt under his shoes. The headache faded, and in its wake he found phrases turning over in his mind the way they had years ago, in the dispersal hut or, even earlier, when he'd been meant to be doing homework. _From darkness to twilight_ and _one last 'all clear.'_ In the quietest stretches he tried other phrases aloud, ones that started _Samantha_ and ended in a question, but none of them felt right.

He'd loitered more than he knew, because when he reached the Bohemia Road and stopped in a pub just up from the police station, he found the landlord tuning the wireless and a crowd already gathered to hear the Prime Minister speak. Andrew drank the glass of water he'd come in for, and declined several offers to stand him a drink, and accepted a few fervent handshakes. When Churchill's voice boomed forth and all eyes turned to the radio, Andrew was glad to melt out the door.

He'd thought, when this moment came, he'd laugh or shout, but in the end what he wanted was to stand under the quiet sky, and breathe.

* * *

Andrew pulled Sam down the steps of the police station and into the tide of people spilling out of houses and shops towards the Parade. Windows were going up and competing gramophones blaring out of them, while ahead someone had started a ragged chorus of _Land of Hope and Glory_. He looked to Sam, but she didn't seem to be seeing any of it. Her face was set in the same puzzled frown she'd worn when he came through the station doors.

"Did you know?" Sam asked abruptly.

"What?" Andrew bent closer to be sure he heard her through the confused noise of the crowd.

"That your father drives."

" _What?!"_ Andrew repeated. "He can't drive. Thank God," he added, grinning.

Sam's frown didn't shift. "Last night, Milner was waiting at the station for him to get back from London, and Mrs. Milner came because he'd had a letter from the Commissioner's office and she couldn't wait any more to open it, but then the baby, I mean she…"

 _May be a father by now_ , Dad had said. "He told me they were at the hospital last night. But what…"

"He drove them!" Sam said miserably. "I was at SSAFA, and Brookie and everyone but Barton had gone over to the new station, and he took the keys and _drove them there!"_

"Are you sure?" Andrew stumbled as someone behind jostled them.

"I thought Brookie must have got it wrong, so I asked Mr. Foyle himself."

"And?"

Sam pulled her chin back and screwed up her eyes, "'Wulllll, never said I couldn't drive, just prefer not to.'"

"Oh, for _Christ's_ sake." Andrew turned back towards the station, but the press of the crowd made it impossible to move in that direction.

"Don't, it's all right," Sam told him, but her voice was flat. "It's silly to care so much when it's all over, in any case. Only I... " She shook her head and looked down.

"Only what?" He touched her arm. "It's not silly to me."

Sam took his arm with both hands, but didn't raise her eyes. "I think," she said, quickly, as if tearing off a scab. "About my mother, when I was small. Even when she was ill, the thing she'd always do was hear… me say my scripture verse on Sundays, and my spelling on weekdays. And when… she was very bad… she'd sleep so much, and Dad would hear me say them but if she woke up I h-had to… do it again… to be kind, to let her feel she still…" Sam swallowed and trailed off. Then she shrugged, a small, miserable motion.

"If I was being humored," she said, after a moment, "I ought to have _known_ it. If I had learned anything about investigation, I would have."

"You're not like your mother," Andrew said. There were a hundred logical contradictions he could offer, starting with the fact that plenty of military officers had drivers as a courtesy rather than due to inability, but he held those back. "You're not, and I've met her, remember."

Sam sighed, clearly unconvinced. "I wanted so much to be useful. But now the past feels as uncertain as the future."

"You are useful. You've been useful. The driving's been the least of it."

She wouldn't meet his eyes. "You really didn't know?"

"I didn't," he said seriously. "I've never known him to drive. It was Uncle Charles who taught me, the summer before I went up to Oxford. I never really thought about why Dad didn't drive; I suppose I thought he didn't have a chance to learn early on and didn't have the time later. It was just the way things were. But it's not like him to…"

"He didn't lie. He was so blasted careful not to. He just let me think…" Sam's fist pulled Andrew's sleeve painfully tight around his arm.

 _Some bloody detective you are, Dad, if you couldn't see how that would hurt her._ "Let all of us think," he said. "I don't know what goes on in his head sometimes."

Sam did laugh at that, but it sounded tinny.

Andrew put his hand over hers, as steadily as he could in the crush. "It doesn't change anything you did. Whatever mysterious automotive secrets Dad's been keeping can't take away the cases you helped solve, the people you helped. That's all real, sweetheart." He studied her bent head, and took a blind shot. "As real as anything I did."

Her arm twitched in his as she gulped. "Flatterer," she said.

"No. I know better… you've taught me better… now." He waited for her to look up, then smiled hesitantly into her too-bright eyes.

She smiled back. "Thanks, then." She let out a breath and Andrew did too, almost in unison. "Come on," she said. "There must be space to dance somewhere. I still haven't taught you to jitterbug."

They danced in the Parade, and by the Town Hall, and with a great crowd by the Stade they danced and paused for beer and roasted potatoes and danced more. It was lucky they'd left their caps at the station, because they'd soon have lost them. They both loosened their ties, and Sam's hair loosened in its Victory roll, and her feet in their sensible shoes flashed over the cobbles. The little tin box weighed in his pocket, and as they whirled phrases rose and sank in his mind: _would you do me the honor… it would make me so happy… you're the most wonderful…_ None of the words seemed quite right, but Sam's smile was bright as a searchlight and she fit in his arms as if they'd been made for her.

After dark there were fireworks and a bonfire on the West Hill, and more dancing. The band played and played - _they must be taking shifts!_ Sam shouted in Andrew's ear. When the music finally stopped, well after midnight, and the crowd thinned, they waltzed by the fading embers of the bonfire, Sam humming snatches of hymns in 3/4 time.

"What are the words to that one?" Andrew asked, pressing his face into her hair.

Sam stopped waltzing and just swayed, leaning close against him. "It's 'King of Love,' you must know it."

"No."

"Oh, you do." She lifted her head to rest her chin on his shoulder. "The king of love my shepherd is…"

"That's not the words you were singing, though."

"No? Oh, it was another verse… _oft I strayed, but yet in love he sought me/and on his shoulder gently laid/ and home, rejoicing, brought me."_

 _Home_. He remembered, suddenly and with the vividness of a film, coming into the house that night in '43 to find Sam at the head of the stairs like St Joan wearing a dressing gown and wielding a frying pan. Sam at the border between the dark and the light. Sam, with him, wherever he was.

"Sweetheart," he started, but Sam was looking over his shoulder.

"I don't suppose there'd be any potatoes left even if we went down to the Stade again," she said.

"Probably not," Andrew agreed. "But we could go back to Dad's, and there's… well, bread and quince jam. Not much else."

"All I have at my lodgings is a quarter cup of flour and a tin of pilchards. And I don't suppose even the end of the war would make Mrs. Chatfield loosen her rules about visiting hours for young men."

"Well, you'd better come over for supper, then. Breakfast. Whatever it is. Dad'll chaperone, we can probably still count on him for that."

"Do you think?" For a moment the dismay showed in her face again, but then she grinned. "All right."

Hand in hand they made their way down the hill and up Steep Lane by the glow of streetlamps more magical, now, than moonlight. There were lights burning in St. Clements' church, behind the newly-uncovered windows, but the houses on either side were dark.

At the steps of the house Andrew reached for his pocket, and his heart dropped. He had the cough-sweet tin with the ring in one pocket, but nothing at all in the other. Without much hope he tried the door, but it was, as always, locked, and not a glimmer of light showed at the windows. "I'm sorry, Sam," he said miserably. "I came away without my key."

"Did you _honestly?"_ Sam stared at him, then fell giggling against the railings.

"Oh, hush." He knocked, hesitantly at first, then louder. "Sam! It isn't that funny, is it?"

"I suppose not… oh, don't ring the bell, let your father sleep." She sat down on the steps. "It can't be long until morning, and it'd be too bad to go in, really, on such a lovely night."

"Sorry," he said again as he sat down beside her.

She slid an arm through his."Oh, hush."

It was a mild night, but it was cooler sitting still; Andrew pulled Sam in close against his side and rubbed her arm through her jacket. "We could go in the church, it's probably open."

"If you're cold." She reached up to brush her fingers over his left temple. "Probably you oughtn't to get chilled."

"I'm all right."

"Good. I couldn't feel right doing this in a church." She slid her hand down behind his ear and pulled his head down to hers for a kiss. "I'm so glad you're home," she whispered against his lips.

"Me, too." He kissed her back.

"Really?"

"Really," Andrew said, and it was true. "I can feel it now."

"Good." She pulled him close again. Her lips were warm and insistent on his. Her fingers stroked his hair down, then roughed it up at the back of his neck, and through their two uniform jackets he could feel her heart and his speed up. Her trembling breath tickled his damp skin, and his breath caught as a warm tremor started at his very core.

For a long time, and no time at all, they kissed, until the iron railing digging into Andrew's back and the cold stone under Sam's free hand made themselves known. Then they settled on the top step, Andrew leaning against the doorjamb and Sam leaning against him, their legs out straight as they stared up at the slowly-brightening sky.

They'd met on this doorstep, Andrew thought, breathing in the smell of Sam's hair. It'd be right… on this first morning of the post-war world… to make the next step here, as well. His pulse picked up again, and Sam cocked her head.

"What are you thinking?"

"Thinking about breakfast with you." Andrew touched his lips to her hair. "Tea with you. Supper, with you. Doing the washing up with you." _Going to bed with you._ "Doing it all the next day, and the day after, and the day after that."

"That sounds marvelous." She trailed her fingers over the back of his hand.

"It does." His heart was going like a machine gun; she must have felt it, but she only snuggled back against him and tucked her head under his chin. "Sam?" He started to ease the tin out of his pocket, but there wasn't much room.

"Mm."

"Sam, I haven't got a nice speech, or a… any solid prospects to offer, or…"

"Wait. Andrew, what?" Sam wriggled until she could look at him. "What are you saying?"

"I'm saying, would you… would you _think_ about… getting married? To me?"

"Oh. _Oh._ You sounded so terribly grim, I thought it must be something serious." She kissed him gently.

"Is… Sam, is that… yes?"

"Andrew." She put a hand on his cheek. "It's yes. Of course it's yes. It's been yes for ages."

"Oh." He laughed with relief and incredulity and anticlimax. "Oh. Well. That's all right, then."

"Absolutely all right." Sam kissed him again.

"Something _serious?"_ Andrew demanded, after a moment.

She gave him a look. "You know what I mean."

"I'm not sure I do." Andrew cocked his head. "Isn't the ordination of matrimony…"

"...it's a sacrament…"

"... be entered into…"

"...utter heathen…"

"...soberly and discreetly…"

"Hold your _tongue,"_ Sam laughed, and for a time the street was quiet again.

"I have got something for you," he said at length. "I mean, if you like it…" He wrestled the tin out of his pocket at last, and opened it under Sam's wondering gaze.

"Oh…" she breathed.

"It doesn't look like much in this light..."

"It's beautiful." Hesitantly, Sam put out her left hand, and Andrew slid the ring onto her finger. It was a little tight - spanners were heavier than paintbrushes - but it went on. " _Oh,"_ Sam said again.

"The stone's…"

"Don't tell me," Sam said. "I want to see, when the sun comes up."

Above them the sky was still black, but across the road, above the terraced houses, it was the color of Andrew's jacket, and in the gap between the brick terrace to the right and the white terrace to the left, it shaded towards the blue of the gauzy dress Sam used to wear dancing, when they were stepping out in secret.

The blue at the horizon brightened to paler blue, and then to white, and then, all in an instant, to a riot of gold that forced them to look away. Light struck the wall above the door first, then crept down towards them, and Sam stretched out a hand to meet it.

" _Oh,"_ she said again, when the garnet flared. "Oh, Andrew." With her other hand she gripped his where it rested around her waist. "There's never been _anything_ so lovely."

"Yes, there has. There's you."

Sam made a small, touched sound, and leaned back against him. "Poet," she whispered, with tears in her voice.

"Once," he whispered back, shaking his head.

"Always."

The victory banners flapped in the morning breeze, the little flags on the ribbons bobbing in and out of shadow like fish jumping for flies. Seagulls wheeled overhead against the cloudless sky.

"You must have often been up all night," Sam said. "Especially at the beginning."

"Not often. But sometimes."

"Does it always feel like this? Like… like being born?"

"No," he answered, thinking of sunrises when he was waiting with his heart in his mouth for the signal to take off, or ones when he'd been coming in on the last drop of petrol and what felt like the last of his strength . "It might from now on, though."

She laughed softly and tipped her face up to the light. Andrew did the same, closing his eyes and breathing deep. The wind picked up again, bringing a hint of salt up from the shore, but the sun was warm and Sam was warmer.

A shadow fell suddenly across Andrew's face, and a stern voice said "What's all this, then?"

He and Sam started at the same moment, then Sam gave a strangled sort of yelp and sprang to her feet.

"Sir!" she gasped.

"Dad!" Andrew said, at nearly the same moment.

Keep Dad out all night and he looked as neat as he had when they left him at the station. A little dust on his shoes, and a few smudges on his overcoat, were the only signs that he wasn't on his way to work. For several endless seconds he squinted at them. Then he pushed his hat back with one hand and rubbed a finger across his forehead. "You two look very. Um."

Sam gave a breathless syllable of a laugh. Andrew risked a sideways glance and saw her hands in fists in front of her belt, the garnet flashing on her left. He looked back to Dad, and caught the shift of his mouth from the frown of concentration to the tight-cornered inverted smile he'd had when Andrew found him at the river.

Dad ducked his head for a moment, then looked up with a twinkle in his eye. "Anything you'd like to tell me? Over breakfast, of course."

* * *

While Sam went upstairs to wash, Dad went to the boot cupboard and came out with a tin of salmon, one of peaches, and one without a label that by its shape Andrew knew must hold pineapple.

"How long have you been hiding those?" Andrew demanded.

"Long enough." He hung up his overcoat, then his jacket as well. "Bring the tins along, will you?" Dad made for the kitchen, turning up his sleeves as he went.

Andrew got the good china from the sideboard; the plates were clean but the teacups looked dusty, so he rinsed and dried them while Dad put the kettle on and produced a packet of Earl Grey from behind the spare teapot in the kitchen dresser.

Sam came down with her hair tidied and her tie done up, but her jacket off and folded over her arm. When she went to hang it up in the hall, Andrew followed, and kissed her at the foot of the stairs before going up himself.

He didn't take the time to shave, but he washed his face and put away his jacket in his bedroom. His hand lingered on his campaign ribbon for a moment before he turned away to open the window.

His notebooks still sat on the desk where he'd left them when he unpacked. He looked at them for a moment, then sat down. The pen in the desk drawer was empty, and the ink bottle dry, but he found a not-too-dull pencil, and opened a notebook to a fresh page.

 _No future's clear to me. I gaze  
from darkness to a summer haze.  
The parting of the clouds of war  
leads only to uncertain days._

 _But I have heard the last all clear,  
And by some grace have made it here  
Where I_

He paused, and struck out _I_.

 _Where we began; and at this door  
Take hands, and banish fear._

"Andrew!" Sam called from the kitchen, and then, with Dad's voice alongside hers, "ANDREW!"

"Coming!" Andrew shouted back. He shut the notebook, and went downstairs to join them.

* * *

*FIN*


End file.
